Tool/package for merging tables with inconsistent column names and categorical variable encoding?

Question

I have 10s of spreadsheets with facility-level rows. Each spreadsheet corresponds to a month. They each contain approximately the same variables (10s of them), but often with different column naming and categorical variable coding schemes. I want to combine them into a single table with facility-month-level rows. Are there any pre-existing tools that are well-suited to this problem?

I'm sort of imagining an R or Python or Stata package that lets me specify a list of lists of column names that all mean the same thing, and a dictionary of variable coding schemes, and then handles the merge while spitting out a summary table highlighting any variables that weren't found in at last one spreadsheet.

Answer 1

Not a complete solution, but in R:

as_tibble(iris) %>% rename(foo = any_of(c("Petal.Length", "OtherName", "OtherOtherName")))

will rename to foo anything that's in that vector of variable names.

h/t Robert On