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rspecial-characters

Selection for specific special character

I am on Windows, using R 3.0.2 (2013-09-25) – Frisbee Sailing I used package XLConnect to import an Excel table into a df called ConsolFLAT. The Excel table contains rows that are totals which I want to filter out. Rows that are totals can be identified by a character "■" as the first character in the GLDESC column, i.e. GLDESC has a row with the value "■cash" which is a total line for all cash, I want to filter these out.

I was able to create a column TOTALS in my data frame that just has the first character with: 

 ConsolFLAT$TOTALS<-(substring(ConsolFLAT$GLDESC,1,1)

I now want filter my dataframe for all rows for which this TOTALS column is not equal to "■" I can't find the character "■" in the ASCII list, but in Excel "code ("■") returns "63" My problem is that I am unable to get R to identify this character, i.e. as.character ("■") returns:[1] "¦"

How do I set up in R a subset function against the character "■"?

Solution 
  • ConsolFLAT[ConsolFLAT$TOTALS != intToUtf8(9632),]

    or

    grep(paste0("^", intToUtf8(9632)), ConsolFLAT$GLDESC, invert=T, value=T)