Menu
I have a field of strings in a data frame all similar to:
"Young Adult – 8-9""
where the inner single " is what I want to replace with nothing to get:
"Young Adult - 8-9"
How can I do this? I tried to escape with a double backslash:
gsub("\\"", "", string)
but got this error: Error: unexpected string constant in "gsub("\"", ""
651
Just use "\"" or '"' to match a single double quote.
Single and double quotes delimit character constants. They can be used interchangeably but double quotes are preferred (and character constants are printed using double quotes), so single quotes are normally only used to delimit character constants containing double quotes.
dQuote in R The dQuote() is a built-in R function used to convert the given string or character vector into double quote text. It takes a specified string or character vector as an argument and returns the double-quoted text. To convert a string or character vector to double-quote text in R, use the dQuote() function.
The single quote version in R is for convenience. (Since) On most keyboards you don't need to use the shift key to type a single quote but you do need the shift for a double quote.
You do not need to escape a double quote in a regular expression. Just use "\"" or '"' to match a single double quote.
s = "Young Adult – 8-9\""
s
[1] "Young Adult – 8-9\""
gsub("\"", "", s)
[1] "Young Adult – 8-9"
gsub('"', "", s)
[1] "Young Adult – 8-9"
See this IDEONE demo
NOTE: Since you want to remove some literal text, you do not even need a regex, use fixed=TRUE argument to speed up the operation:
gsub('"', "", s, fixed=TRUE)
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
