Hi everyone, I am using Michael's approach (grepl()) to identify which columns containing $ signs. I was hoping to incorporate this into a line of code that would automatically 1) find which columns contain $ signs, 2) strip the $ and commas, and 3) convert the result to a numeric vector.
I have the following: col.id<-function(x) any(grepl("\\$",x)) cand2[which(sapply(cand2,col.id))]<- as.numeric(gsub("[$,]","",cand2[which(sapply(cand2,col.id))])) However, I am doing something wrong: while the code correctly identifies the columns containing $ signs, it also returns ALL NA for those columns. See my initial message for this thread for example data. Any assistance is appreciated. Thanks! Dan On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 9:04 AM, R. Michael Weylandt <michael.weyla...@gmail.com> wrote: > Either > > any(grepl("$",x, fixed = TRUE)) # You probably want grepl not grep > any(grepl("\\$",x) ) > ? regexpr # $ has a special value > > Michael > > PS -- Stop with HTML postings (seriously, it actually does mess up > what the rest of us see and I think it causes trouble for the archives > as well) > > On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 8:49 AM, Dan Abner <dan.abne...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hello everyone, >> >> I am writing my own function to return the column index of all variables >> (these are currently character vectors) in a data frame that contain a >> dollar sign($). A small piece of the data look like this: >> >> can_sta can_zip ind_ite_con ind_uni_con AL 36106 $251,895.80 $22,874.43 >> AL 35802 $141,373.60 $7,100.00 AL 35201 $273,208.50 $18,193.66 AR >> 72404 $186,918.00 >> $25,391.00 AR 72217 $451,127.00 $27,255.23 AR 7.28E+08 $58,336.22 $5,293.82 >> >> >> So far I have: >> >> >> col.id<-function(x) any(grep("$",x)) >> sapply(cand2,col.id) >> >> However, this returns TRUE for all columns (even those that do not contain >> the $). >> >> Any assistance is appreciated. >> >> Thank you, >> >> Dan >> >> [[alternative HTML version deleted]] >> >> ______________________________________________ >> R-help@r-project.org mailing list >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help >> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html >> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.