Gsub apostrophe in data frame R

Question

I need to remove all apostrophes from my data frame but as soon as I use....

textDataL <- gsub("'","",textDataL)

The data frame gets ruined and the new data frame only contains values and NAs, when I am only looking to remove any apostrophes from any text that might be in there? Am I missing something obvious with apostrophes and data frames?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 04 '14 at 14:56

To keep the structure intact:

 dat1 <- data.frame(Col1= c("a woman's hat", "the boss's wife", "Mrs. Chang's house", "Mr Cool"),
 Col2= c("the class's hours", "Mr. Jones' golf clubs", "the canvas's size", "Texas' weather"),
 stringsAsFactors=F)

I would use

     dat1[] <- lapply(dat1, gsub, pattern="'", replacement="")

or

     library(stringr)
     dat1[] <- lapply(dat1, str_replace_all, "'","")
 dat1
#                Col1                 Col2
# 1      a womans hat     the classs hours
# 2    the bosss wife Mr. Jones golf clubs
# 3 Mrs. Changs house     the canvass size
# 4           Mr Cool        Texas weather

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 04 '14 at 14:26

1

You don't want to apply gsub directly on a data frame, but column-wise instead, e.g.

apply(textDataL, 2, gsub, pattern = "'", replacement = "")

answered Jul 04 '14 at 14:26

konvas

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I would assume the result to be matrix. If that is the case, gsub("'", "", as.matrix(textDataL) should work. – akrun Jul 04 '14 at 14:43

Gsub apostrophe in data frame R

2 Answers2