Create empty data frame with column names by assigning a string vector?

How about:

df <- data.frame(matrix(ncol = 3, nrow = 0))
x <- c("name", "age", "gender")
colnames(df) <- x

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To do all these operations in one-liner:

setNames(data.frame(matrix(ncol = 3, nrow = 0)), c("name", "age", "gender"))

#[1] name   age    gender
#<0 rows> (or 0-length row.names)

Or

data.frame(matrix(ncol=3,nrow=0, dimnames=list(NULL, c("name", "age", "gender"))))