Remove special apostrophe in R

Question

I am doing some text mining and I would like to remove the apostrophe " from my text (delete it). I tried to use gsub as follow but it does not work

text <- "\"branch"

removeSpecialChars <- function(x){
     result <- gsub('"',x)
     return(result)
}

without <- removeSpecialChars(text)

The desired Output would be branch and not "branch. Thanks for your help

EDIT to go further (i am trying to clean a text).

The Input is a list conatining a lot of different string. For example

Input <- list(c("e","b", "stackoverflow", "\"branch"))

cleanCorpus <- function(corpus){
  corpus.tmp <- tm_map(corpus, removePunctuation,preserve_intra_word_dashes = TRUE)

  removeSpecialChars <- function(x){
    result <- gsub('"', "",x)
    return(result)
  }
  corpus.tmp <- removeSpecialChars(corpus.tmp)

  corpus.tmp <- tm_map(corpus.tmp, stripWhitespace)
  corpus.tmp <- tm_map(corpus.tmp, content_transformer(tolower))
  corpus.tmp <- tm_map(corpus.tmp, removeWords, stopwords("english"))
  return(corpus.tmp)
}
result <- cleanCorpus(Input)

May be the string you pasted here is not the one you have. In your `gsub` call, there is no replacement. — akrun, May 12 '16 at 09:32
@akrun thanks for your help however, i still have an error message no applicable method for 'tm_map' applied to an object of class "character". Do you know why? thanks — richpiana, May 12 '16 at 09:33
@akrun I add some codes, i try to build a function to clean text but it does not work, do you have any idea? — richpiana, May 12 '16 at 09:35
sorry for this misspecification. it's some text read by the package tm from a pdf. — richpiana, May 12 '16 at 09:40
Youre right sorry, since i am using internal data at my firm I try to create an Input which may help you to understand what I want. I would like the Input without any " — richpiana, May 12 '16 at 09:56

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

3

We need to use the replacement

gsub('"', "", text)
#[1] "branch"

data

text <- "\"branch"

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

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answered May 12 '16 at 09:33

akrun

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered May 12 '16 at 09:33

1

result <- gsub("\"",text) will work for you. You need to override that " by using .

answered May 12 '16 at 09:33

abhiieor

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Remove special apostrophe in R

2 Answers2

data