rjanitor

How to remove empty spaces and omit the rows that has those empty spaces in R

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So I tried to use df <- remove_empty(df, which=c("rows","cols"), cutoff = 1). It did not remove any of it even though there are empty slots in the data. Not sure what I did wrong or what I need to do to change, to make it remove the row entirely.

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The results remained the same, as the blank spaces are still there and have yet to be omitted.

Solution

  • Consider this example data.frame, which has empty strings (and some NA's).

    > dat
    V1   V2 V3 V4 V5
1    A    A  1  6 11
2    B    B  2  7 12
3            3  8 13
4            4  9 14
5 <NA> <NA>  5 10 15

    First, you want to replace the empty strings with NA's and assign it back to dat[],

    > dat[] <- lapply(dat, \(x) replace(x, x  %in% "", NA))
> dat
    V1   V2 V3 V4 V5
1    A    A  1  6 11
2    B    B  2  7 12
3 <NA> <NA>  3  8 13
4 <NA> <NA>  4  9 14
5 <NA> <NA>  5 10 15

    then subset the rows withcomplete.cases.

    > dat <- dat[complete.cases(dat), ]
> dat
  V1 V2 V3 V4 V5
1  A  A  1  6 11
2  B  B  2  7 12

    In one step:

    > dat |> lapply(\(x) replace(x, x  %in% "", NA)) |> data.frame() |> {\(.) .[complete.cases(.), ]}()
  V1 V2 V3 V4 V5
1  A  A  1  6 11
2  B  B  2  7 12

    Data:

    dat <- structure(list(V1 = c("A", "B", "", "", NA), V2 = c("A", "B", 
"", "", NA), V3 = c("1", "2", "3", "4", "5"), V4 = c("6", "7", 
"8", "9", "10"), V5 = c("11", "12", "13", "14", "15")), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, 
-5L))