Remove / replace special characters like # and also blank cells from the dataset in R

Question

How do I remove special characters like # from a dataset in R? I have dataset like this,

X Id           V1         V2
1 65          245         Good
2 41          245         Good
3 48          245            $
4 74          245         Good
6 54                      Good
7 60          245         Good

I tried to remove the special characters by using the following line

df2[, (1:3)] <- sapply(df2[, (1:3)], function(col) {
  as.numeric(sub("[*]$#", "", col))
})

but this is not working? Is their any way to remove the blank cells as well using the above code or in one same line?

Hi user3448883, welcome to SO! If you want to get a quick answer, it would help to post a small example of the type of data you are working with, and exactly what you are looking for as far as output. Check out http://stackoverflow.com/a/5963610/554531 — Keith Hughitt, Jan 03 '17 at 13:12

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 03 '17 at 13:14

2

With stringr try the following (on a string s):

library(stringr)
str_replace_all(s, "[[:punct:]]", "") # if you want to remove the punctuations
str_replace_all(s, "[^[:alnum:]]", "") # if you want to keep only the alphanumerics

answered Jan 03 '17 at 13:14

Sandipan Dey

21,482
2
51
63

why not `gsub()` ? though this is also perfect! – joel.wilson Jan 03 '17 at 13:16
sure sub / gsub will also do from base R – Sandipan Dey Jan 03 '17 at 13:16
It works, but how should i approach if i need to search and replace for the entire dataset? I dont know whether this approach itself works for that.? Thanks in advance. – MargS Jan 03 '17 at 14:27
We can apply the replace function for each column in the dataset – Sandipan Dey Jan 03 '17 at 14:57

Remove / replace special characters like # and also blank cells from the dataset in R

1 Answers1