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rdataframegsubapostrophe

Gsub apostrophe in data frame R

I need to remove all apostrophes from my data frame but as soon as I use....

textDataL <- gsub("'","",textDataL)

The data frame gets ruined and the new data frame only contains values and NAs, when I am only looking to remove any apostrophes from any text that might be in there? Am I missing something obvious with apostrophes and data frames?

Solution

  • To keep the structure intact:

     dat1 <- data.frame(Col1= c("a woman's hat", "the boss's wife", "Mrs. Chang's house", "Mr Cool"),
 Col2= c("the class's hours", "Mr. Jones' golf clubs", "the canvas's size", "Texas' weather"),
 stringsAsFactors=F)

    I would use

         dat1[] <- lapply(dat1, gsub, pattern="'", replacement="")

    or

         library(stringr)
     dat1[] <- lapply(dat1, str_replace_all, "'","")
 dat1
#                Col1                 Col2
# 1      a womans hat     the classs hours
# 2    the bosss wife Mr. Jones golf clubs
# 3 Mrs. Changs house     the canvass size
# 4           Mr Cool        Texas weather