In general, we want a solution that is vectorised, so here's a better test example:
whitespace <- " \t\n\r\v\f" # space, tab, newline,
# carriage return, vertical tab, form feed
x <- c(
" x y ", # spaces before, after and in between
" \u2190 \u2192 ", # contains unicode chars
paste0( # varied whitespace
whitespace,
"x",
whitespace,
"y",
whitespace,
collapse = ""
),
NA # missing
)
## [1] " x y "
## [2] " ← → "
## [3] " \t\n\r\v\fx \t\n\r\v\fy \t\n\r\v\f"
## [4] NA
The base R approach: gsub
gsub replaces all instances of a string (fixed = TRUE) or regular expression (fixed = FALSE, the default) with another string. To remove all spaces, use:
As DWin noted, in this case fixed = TRUE isn't necessary but provides slightly better performance since matching a fixed string is faster than matching a regular expression.
If you want to remove all types of whitespace, use:
gsub("[[:space:]]", "", x) # note the double square brackets
## [1] "xy" "←→" "xy" NA
gsub("\\s", "", x) # same; note the double backslash
library(regex)
gsub(space(), "", x) # same
"[:space:]" is an R-specific regular expression group matching all space characters. \s is a language-independent regular-expression that does the same thing.
The stringr approach: str_replace_all and str_trim
stringr provides more human-readable wrappers around the base R functions (though as of Dec 2014, the development version has a branch built on top of stringi, mentioned below). The equivalents of the above commands, using [str_replace_all][3], are:
stringr also has a str_trim function which removes only leading and trailing whitespace.
str_trim(x)
## [1] "x y" "← →" "x \t\n\r\v\fy" NA
str_trim(x, "left")
## [1] "x y " "← → "
## [3] "x \t\n\r\v\fy \t\n\r\v\f" NA
str_trim(x, "right")
## [1] " x y" " ← →"
## [3] " \t\n\r\v\fx \t\n\r\v\fy" NA
The stringi approach: stri_replace_all_charclass and stri_trim
stringi is built upon the platform-independent ICU library, and has an extensive set of string manipulation functions. The equivalents of the above are:
Here "\\p{WHITE_SPACE}" is an alternate syntax for the set of Unicode code points considered to be whitespace, equivalent to "[[:space:]]", "\\s" and space(). For more complex regular expression replacements, there is also stri_replace_all_regex.
I just learned about the "stringr" package to remove white space from the beginning and end of a string with str_trim( , side="both") but it also has a replacement function so that:
a <- " xx yy 11 22 33 "
str_replace_all(string=a, pattern=" ", repl="")
[1] "xxyy112233"
Please note that soultions written above removes only space. If you want also to remove tab or new line use stri_replace_all_charclass from stringi package.
library(stringi)
stri_replace_all_charclass(" ala \t ma \n kota ", "\\p{WHITE_SPACE}", "")
## [1] "alamakota"