How to replace '+' using gsub() function in R [duplicate]

Question

I'm trying to remove the '+' character present inside one of the string element of a data frame. But I'm not able to find a way out of it.

Below is data frame.

txtdf <- structure(list(ID = 1:9, Var1 = structure(c(1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 4L, 
            5L, 5L, 2L, 3L), .Label = c("government", "parliament", "parliment", 
            "poli+tician", "politician"), class = "factor")), .Names = c("ID", 
            "Var1"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -9L))
#  ID   Var1
#  1    government
#  2    government
#  3    government
#  4    government
#  5    poli+tician
#  6    politician
#  7    politician
#  8    parliament
#  9    parliment

I tried two ways, neither of them gave the expected results:

Way1

txtdf <- gsub("[:punct:]","", txtdf)
# [1] "goverme" "goverme" "goverme" "goverme" "oli+iia" "oliiia"  "oliiia" 
# [8] "arliame" "arlime" 

I don't understand what's wrong here. I want the '+' characters to be replaced with no value for the 5th element alone, but all the elements are edited as above.

Way2

txtdf<-gsub("*//+","",txtdf)
# [1] "government"  "government"  "government"  "government"  "poli+tician"
# [6] "politician"  "politician"  "parliament"  "parliment" 

Here there is no change at all. What I think I've tried is, i tried to escape the + character using double slashes.

Answer 1

Simply replace it with fixed = TRUE (no need to use a regular expression) but you have to do the replacement for each "column" of the data.frame by specifying the column name:

txtdf <- data.frame(job = c("government", "poli+tician", "parliament"))
txtdf

gives

          job
1  government
2 poli+tician
3  parliament

Now replace the "+":

txtdf$job <- gsub("+", "", txtdf$job, fixed = TRUE)
txtdf

The result is:

         job
1 government
2 politician
3 parliament