On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 11:49:05PM -0500, Sparks, John James wrote:
> Dear R Users,
>
> I am working with gsub for the first time. I am trying to remove some
> characters from a string. I have hit the problem where the period is the
> shorthand for 'everything' in the R language when what I want to remove is
> the actual periods. In the example below, I simply want to remove the
> periods as I have removed the comma, but instead the complete string is
> wiped out. I would appreciate it if someone could let me know how I
> communicate that I want to remove the period verbatim to R.
>
> Many thanks.
> --John Sparks
>
> > txt="This is a test. However, it is only a test."
> > txt2<-gsub(",","",txt)
> > txt2
> [1] "This is a test. However it is only a test."
> > txt3<-gsub(".","",txt)
> > txt3
> [1] ""
In order to force a "." to be interpreted literally, it is
possible to use "\\." as follows
gsub("\\.","",txt)
[1] "This is a test However, it is only a test"
Petr Savicky.
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