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How do I strip dollar signs ($) from data/ escape special characters in R?

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Tags : R escaping
  • 346 3
    I've been using gsub("toreplace","replacement", myvector) to clean out data in R. While this works for commas and the like, removing "$" has no effect. So if I do gsub("$","",myvector) all the dollar signs remain in place.

    I think this is because $ is a special character in R. I tried escaping it "\$" but that yields the same result (no effect). And I couldn't find a resource on escaping special characters in R.

    Obviously I should do this in preprocessing. But I was wondering if anyone out there knew how to either a) escape special characters in R b) get rid of pesky $ in R directly. For science.
      November 1, 2021 2:41 PM IST
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  • 317

    Escaping characters can be a pain some times, but just putting it in square brackets (make it a character class) helps with this:

    > gsub("[$]","",c("$100","ta$ty"))
[1] "100"  "taty"
      November 25, 2021 11:48 AM IST
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  • 181
    if you have $ followed by number in set of data columns (e.g. $400,000) there is an easier way that worked like charm for me. data%>% mutate_at(5:6, parse_number) where 5:6 are the data column numbers.
      December 1, 2021 10:57 AM IST
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  • 319 1

    You have to escape it twice, first for R, second for the regex.

    gsub('\\$', '', c("a$a", "bb$"))
[1] "aa" "bb"

     

     
     
      November 3, 2021 2:06 PM IST
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