I have a uncleaned character vector, and I want to remove certain characters in that vector that don't belong to another character vector. So basically I know what I want to keep, but I don't know exactly what to remove, which makes gsub() and str_replace_all hard to work.
The character string I want to clean is issue_uncleaned, and it looks like this (not the complete version):
[1] "Facebook Fact-checks; Coronavirus; TikTok posts "
[2] "Facebook Fact-checks; Facebook posts "
[3] "Facebook Fact-checks; Coronavirus; Bloggers "
[4] "Facebook Fact-checks; Facebook posts "
[5] "National; Criminal Justice; Crime; Facebook Fact-checks; Facebook posts "
The character string I want to use as a filter to remove unwanted characters is 151_issues, and it looks like this(not the complete version):
[1] "Facebook Fact-checks" "Coronavirus" “Crime”
My desired results: (if there are also ways to remove the ; at the beginning or at the last, it would be better)
[1] "Facebook Fact-checks; Coronavirus; "
[2] "Facebook Fact-checks; "
[3] "Facebook Fact-checks; Coronavirus; "
[4] "Facebook Fact-checks; "
[5] "; ; Crime; Facebook Fact-checks; "
Many thanks for your help!
issue_uncleaned <- c("Facebook Fact-checks; Coronavirus; TikTok posts ", "Facebook Fact-checks; Facebook posts ", "Facebook Fact-checks; Coronavirus; Bloggers ", "Facebook Fact-checks; Facebook posts ", "National; Criminal Justice; Crime; Facebook Fact-checks; Facebook posts ")
issues_151 <- c("Facebook Fact-checks", "Coronavirus", "Crime")
k <- strsplit(issue_uncleaned, "; ")
k <- lapply(k, trimws) # removes the white space at the end or beginning
k2 <- sapply(1:length(k), function(x, data){return(data[[x]][which(data[[x]] %in% issues_151)])}, data = k)
issue_cleaned <- sapply(k2, paste0, collapse = "; ")