gsub() in R is not replacing '.' (dot)

Question

I want to replace dots in "2014.06.09" to "2014-06-09". I am using gsub() function for it. If

x <-  "2014.06.09" gsub('2', '-' ,x) # [1] "-014.06.09" 

But when I try

gsub('.', '-', x) # [1] "----------" 

instead of "2014-06-09".

class(x) # "character" 

Can some suggest me a way to get this right and also why it is not working for '.' (dot)

Answer 1

You may need to escape the . which is a special character that means "any character" (from @Mr Flick's comment)

 gsub('\\.', '-', x)  #[1] "2014-06-09" 

Or

gsub('[.]', '-', x) #[1] "2014-06-09" 

Or as @Moix mentioned in the comments, we can also use fixed=TRUE instead of escaping the characters.

 gsub(".", "-", x, fixed = TRUE) 

Answer 2

For more complex tasks the stringr package could be interesting

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/stringr/vignettes/stringr.html

https://github.com/rstudio/cheatsheets/raw/master/strings.pdf

library(stringr)  str_replace_all(x,"\\.","-") ## [1] "2014-06-09" 

Or

str_replace_all(x,"[.]","-") ## [1] "2014-06-09"