r - How to create example data set from private data (replacing variable names and levels with uninformative place holders)?

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To provide a reproducible example of
an approach, a data set must often be provided. Instead of building an example data set,
I wish to use some of my own data. However this data can not be released. I wish to
replace variable (column) names and factor levels with uninformative place holders (eg.
V1....V5, L1....L5).

Is
an automated way to do this
available?

Ideally,
this would be done in R, taking in a data.frame and producing this anonymous
data.frame.

With such a data set, simply search
and replace variable names in your script and you have a publicly releasable
reproducible example.

Such a process
may increase the inclusion of appropriate data in reproducible examples and even the
inclusion of reproducible examples in questions, comments and bug
reports.

Answer

I don't know whether there
was a function to automate this, but now there
is ;)

## A function to anonymise
            columns in 'colIDs' 
## colIDs can be either column names or integer
            indices
anonymiseColumns <- function(df, colIDs) {
 id <-
            if(is.character(colIDs)) match(colIDs, names(df)) else colIDs
 for(id in
            colIDs) {

 prefix <- sample(LETTERS, 1)
 suffix <-
            as.character(as.numeric(as.factor(df[[id]])))
 df[[id]] <- paste(prefix,
            suffix, sep="")
 }
 names(df)[id] <- paste("V", id,
            sep="")
 df
}

## A data.frame containing
            sensitive information
df <- data.frame(

 name =
            rep(readLines(file.path(R.home("doc"), "AUTHORS"))[9:13], each=2),
 hiscore =
            runif(10, 99, 100),
 passwd = replicate(10, paste(sample(c(LETTERS, letters),
            9), collapse="")))

## Anonymise it
df2 <-
            anonymiseColumns(df, c(1,3))

## Check that it worked
>
            head(df, 3)
 name hiscore passwd

1 Douglas Bates 99.96714
            ROELIAncz
2 Douglas Bates 99.07243 gDOLNMyVe
3 John Chambers
            99.55322 xIVPHDuEW 

> head(df2, 3)
 name hiscore
            V3
1 Q1 99.96714 V8
2 Q1 99.07243 V2
3 Q2 99.55322
            V9