rfunctionremove-if

How to remove part of characters in data frame column


I have a data frame as follows (part of a larger set):

data frame

for the column raw$Zipcode I need to remove the two 00 before the Zipcode number for Swedish zipcodes (preferably through a function). I am very new to R and have found gsub and strsplit but can't seem to make it work:

raw2 <- unlist(strsplit(raw$ZipCode, split="00", fixed=TRUE))[2]

The zeroes are characters as other countries in the data set have letters. How can I remove the first two zeroes in all cases of the two first character letters being zeroes in a column?


Solution

  • There are multiple ways of doing this:

    1. Using as.numeric on a column of your choice.
    raw$Zipcode <- as.numeric(raw$Zipcode)
    
    1. If you want it to be a character then you can use stringr package.
    library(stringr)
    raw$Zipcode <- str_replace(raw$Zipcode, "^0+" ,"")
    
    1. There is another function called str_remove in stringr package.
    raw$Zipcode <- str_remove(raw$Zipcode, "^0+")
    
    1. You can also use sub from base R.
    raw$Zipcode <- sub("^0+", "", raw$Zipcode)
    

    But if you want to remove n number of leading zeroes, replace + with {n} to remove them.

    For instance to remove two 0's use sub("^0{2}", "", raw$Zipcode).