Numbers to month names in spanish

Question

I´m trying to translate a column on a dataframe that has month numbers (1 for January, 2 for February and so on), so I want to translate those numbers to spanish month names. First I tried:

df$month <- month.name[df$month]

That works fine, but the outputs shows english names.

Then I tried using gsub:

num <- c(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12)
meses <- c("Enero","Febrero","Marzo","Abril","Mayo","Junio","Julio",
        "Agosto","Septiembre","Octubre","Noviembre","Diciembre")
gsub2 <- function(pattern, replacement, x, ...) {
  for(i in 1:length(pattern))
    x <- gsub(pattern[i], replacement[i], x, ...)
  x
}
df$month <- gsub2(num, meses,df$month)

But with this code, my output is as follows:

"Enero"        "Febrero"      "Marzo"     "Abril"        "Mayo"        
 "Junio"        "Julio"        "Agosto"    "Septiembre"  "Enero0"           "EneroEnero"   "EneroFebrero"

I know what is happening, but I don't know how to fix it. Thanks in advance.

Edit:

df$month <- c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ,7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)

Answer 1

Instead of using regex, this can be better solved with vectorization

unname(setNames(meses, num)[tabla$month])
#[1] "Abril"      "Marzo"      "Septiembre" "Julio"      "Agosto"     "Diciembre"  "Abril"      "Octubre"    "Octubre"    "Abril"      "Agosto"     "Mayo"      
#[13] "Septiembre" "Septiembre" "Abril"      "Noviembre"  "Marzo"      "Enero"      "Julio"      "Febrero"   

and the corresponding tabla$month is

tabla$month
#[1]  4  3  9  7  8 12  4 10 10  4  8  5  9  9  4 11  3  1  7  2

---

Regarding the use of regex, probably, we need to add the start (^) and end ($) to avoid getting matches for 1 multiple times in 11 or 1 and 2 for 12 etc resulting in "EneroEnero" or "EneroFebrero"

gsub2 <- function(pattern, replacement, x, ...) {
   for(i in 1:length(pattern))
   x<- gsub(paste0("^", pattern[i], "$"), replacement[i], x , ...)
  x
 }

gsub2(num, meses,tabla$month)
#[1] "Abril"      "Marzo"      "Septiembre" "Julio"      "Agosto"     "Diciembre"  "Abril"      "Octubre"    "Octubre"    "Abril"      "Agosto"     "Mayo"      
#[13] "Septiembre" "Septiembre" "Abril"      "Noviembre"  "Marzo"      "Enero"      "Julio"      "Febrero"   

data

set.seed(24)
tabla <- data.frame(month = sample(1:12, 20, replace = TRUE))