How to remove regular expressions in a string in R?

Question

The string is "\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLocation\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA;Oakland, CA" and I want it to be shown as "Location","San Francisco, CA;Oakland, CA".

Is there a function for this? Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use a regular expression to remove the special characters:

x <-"\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLocation\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA;Oakland, CA"

gsub('[\r\n\t]', '', x)

However, if you really have a string with all those \ the answer becomes something more like:

gsub('\\\\[a-z]', '', x)