[R] removing characters from a string

[John Fox]

Dear Vivek,

Actually, I think R has reasonably good facilities for manipulating strings.
See ?gsub etc.; for example:

gsub("[^0-9]", "", "XKa0&*1jk2")
[1] "012"

I hope this helps,
 John

--------------------------------
John Fox
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario
Canada L8S 4M4
905-525-9140x23604
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox 
-------------------------------- 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Vivek Rao
> Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2005 7:55 AM
> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: [R] removing characters from a string
> 
> Is there a simple way in R to remove all characters from a 
> string other than those in a specified set? For example, I 
> want to keep only the digits 0-9 in a string.
> 
> In general, I have found the string handling abilities of R a 
> bit limited. (Of course it's great for stats in general). Is 
> there a good reference on this? Or should R programmers dump 
> their output to a text file and use something like Perl or 
> Python for sophisticated text processing?
> 
> I am familiar with the basic functions such as nchar, 
> substring, as.integer, print, cat, sprintf etc.
>