I have some rather messy degrees, decimal minutes coordinates (the source of which is out of my control) in the following format (see below). I am trying to work out the distance between the points ultimately.
minlat <- "51 12.93257'"
maxlat <- "66 13.20549'"
minlong <- "- 5 1.23944'"
maxlong <- "- 5 1.36293'"
As they are they are in a rather unfriendly format for (from measurements package):
measurements::conv_unit(minlat, from = 'deg_dec_min', to = 'dec_deg')
and ultimately
distm(c(minlong, minlat), c(maxlong, maxlat), fun = distHaversine)
I think I need to use the gsub( to get them into a friendly format, whereby I would like them to be
minlat <- 51 12.93257 # removing the double space
minlong <- -4 1.36293 # removing the double space and the space after the -
I've been messing around with gusb( all morning and it has beaten me, any help would be great!!
It sounds like you just need to strip all excess whitespace. We can try using gsub with lookarounds here.
minlong <- " - 5 1.23944 " # -5 1.23944
minlong
gsub("(?<=^|\\D) | (?=$|\\D)", "", gsub("\\s+", " ", minlong), perl=TRUE)
[1] " - 5 1.23944 "
[1] "-5 1.23944"
The inner call to gsub replaces any occurence of two or more spaces with just a single space. The outer call then selectively removes a remaining single space only if it not be sandwiched between two digits.