I am trying to import an xlsx file. Unfortunately the variable names will contain special characters and blanks (there are many such columns). The data is being downloaded from a third party provider to this xlsx sheet and I have no control over their naming convention. Furthermore, we will want to periodically update this spreadsheet (possibly adding more variables and switching the order of columns) and rerun the import statement for analysis purposes. Because of these concerns it would not be practical to hard code the names of each variable upon import. I would like to strip out all of the special characters and spaces upon import (or replace them with underscores). This used to be feasible with the GETNAMES option for xls files but I do not believe that it is supported for xlsx file types (we need the xlsx file type because there is to much data for an xls). Does anyone have any thoughts about how to rename these variables upon import (without changing the excel file)?
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