Remove line breaks "\n" in R

Question

I have been trying to remove the line breaks from a data set in R. All the columns are factors hence before i could replace the "\n" with "NA", i need to change the data type from factor to character or Date. I am mentioning my code and a sample data set for a better understanding:

     sku          Stockout_start        Stockout_End      create_date
  0BX-164463    \N                 1/29/2015 11:35  1/29/2015 11:35
  0BX-164463    2/11/2015 18:01               \N    2/11/2015 18:01
  0BX-164464    \N                 1/29/2015 11:38  1/29/2015 11:38
  0BX-164464    1/30/2015 4:38                  \N  1/30/2015 4:38
  0BX-164481    \N                 1/28/2015 9:58   1/28/2015 9:58
  0BX-164482    \N                1/29/2015 11:37   1/29/2015 11:37
  0BX-164482    2/4/2015 7:17                 \N    2/4/2015 7:17
  0BX-164483    \N                1/29/2015 11:37   1/29/2015 11:37
  0BX-164483    2/7/2015 4:37                 \N    2/7/2015 4:37
  0BX-164496    \N                1/29/2015 9:45    1/29/2015 9:45
  0BX-164497    \N                1/28/2015 10:02   1/28/2015 10:02
  0BX-164498    \N                1/29/2015 9:45    1/29/2015 9:45
  0BX-164499    \N                1/29/2015 11:36   1/29/2015 11:36
  0BX-164500    \N                1/29/2015 11:36   1/29/2015 11:36
  0BX-164501    \N                1/29/2015 11:36   1/29/2015 11:36

I have been using below mentioned codes to correct the data:

stk[,2]<- as.Date(as.character(stk[,2]),format = "%y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
stk[,2]<- as.character(as.Date(stk[,2], origin = "1970-01-01"))

But these codes change my column 2 to "NA". Kindly help.

Answer 1

You could specify na.strings and stringsAsFactors=FALSE in the read.csv/read.table. (I changed the delimiter to , and saved the input data)

 stk <- read.csv('Akash.csv', header=TRUE, stringsAsFactors=FALSE,
       sep=",", na.strings="\\N")
 head(stk,3)
 #         sku  Stockout_start    Stockout_End     create_date
 #1   0BX-164463            <NA> 1/29/2015 11:35 1/29/2015 11:35
 #2   0BX-164463 2/11/2015 18:01            <NA> 2/11/2015 18:01
 #3   0BX-164464            <NA> 1/29/2015 11:38 1/29/2015 11:38

If you need to replace multiple columns to "Date" class

 stk[-1] <- lapply(stk[-1], as.Date, format='%m/%d/%Y %H:%M') 
 str(stk)
 #'data.frame': 15 obs. of  4 variables:
 #$ sku           : chr  "  0BX-164463" "  0BX-164463" "  0BX-164464" "  0BX-164464" ...
 #$ Stockout_start: Date, format: NA "2015-02-11" ...
 #$ Stockout_End  : Date, format: "2015-01-29" NA ...
 #$ create_date   : Date, format: "2015-01-29" "2015-02-11" ...