rstringgsubcharacter-replacement

Replace multiple strings in one gsub() or chartr() statement in R?

I have a string variable containing alphabet [a-z], space [ ], and apostrophe ['], e.g. x <- "a'b c" I want to replace apostrophe ['] with blank [], and replace space [ ] with underscore [_].

x <- gsub("'", "", x)
x <- gsub(" ", "_", x)

It works absolutely, but when I have a lot of conditions, the code becomes ugly. Therefore, I want to use chartr(), but chartr() can't deal with blank, e.g.

x <- chartr("' ", "_", x) 
#Error in chartr("' ", "_", "a'b c") : 'old' is longer than 'new'

Is there any way to solve this problem? thanks!

Solution

  • You can use gsubfn

    library(gsubfn)
gsubfn(".", list("'" = "", " " = "_"), x)
# [1] "ab_c"

    Similarly, we can also use mgsub which allows multiple replacement with multiple pattern to search

    mgsub::mgsub(x, c("'", " "), c("", "_"))
#[1] "ab_c"