I have a vector which contains numbers, NAs and blanks where I only wish to keep the numbers. I was initially trying a gsub out everything that wasnt a number using;
gsub(!'[:digit:]', '', myexample)
Although had no joy. Thinking more I'm not sure a gsub is the best think to use here, maybe a which() argument although I'm not sure how you'd only select digits.
Example of vector shown below;
myexample
# [1] "319939" "" "" "318273" NA "317889" NA "316060"
Part two of my question is when we are dealing with characters rather than numbers. In this instance I wish to do the same (keep the names), and remove the nas (na-na) and black values ("-"). Although this time as this vector comes from a paste R does not recognize na-na as a true NA value.
characterexample
"random-name" "-" "-" "na-na" "name-random"
I think you could use grep instead of gsub
> myexmaple <- c("319939", "", "", "318273", NA, "317889", NA, "316060")
> grep("^\\d+$", myexmaple, value = TRUE)
[1] "319939" "318273" "317889" "316060"
For you second question, you can use %in%
> characterexample[!characterexample %in% c("na-na", "-")]
[1] "random-name" "name-random"