Create valid name for one instrument

If you are only downloading data for a single symbol and that symbol is not a syntactically valid name, you can set auto.assign = FALSE in your call to getSymbols(). That will allow you to directly assign the output to a syntactically valid name.

You may also want to convert the column names to syntactically valid names. That is a good idea if you plan to use the data in functions that expect column names to be syntactically valid names (e.g. lm()).