[R] strip white in character strings

[Roland Rau]

Dear all,

I would like to say thanks for the help of Mark Leeds (off-list), 
Jeremiah Rounds (off-list), and Jim Holtman.

I will use the solution Mark and Jim provided using the gsub function.
A bit embarrassing for me that I did not remember the function since I 
used it myself awhile ago.

I am still impressed with the R community: three good answers in less 
than one hour.
What is the average time for support staff of proprietary (statistical) 
software providers to respond to user questions (and how much does it cost)?

Thanks again,
Roland


jim holtman wrote:
> It depends on what you mean by striping the white space.  Here is an 
> example of how it might be done:
>  
>  > x <- c("United Kingdom", "Europe", "United States", "a       
> longer         string")
>  > gsub(" +", "_", x)
> [1] "United_Kingdom"  "Europe"          "United_States"   "a_longer_string"
>  >
> 
> 
> On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 12:06 PM, Roland Rau <roland.rproject at gmail.com 
> <mailto:roland.rproject at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Dear all,
> 
>     I have several datasets and I want to generate pdf plots from them.
>     I also want to generate automatically the names of the files. They
>     are country-specific and the element mycurrentdata[1,1] contains
>     this information.
> 
>     So what I do is something like this:
>     pdf(file=paste(mycurrentdata[1,1], ".pdf", sep=""), width=...etc)
> 
>     The only problem I have is that some of the country names contain
>     white space (e.g., "United Kingdom"). This is no problem for
>     generating the pdf plots but it may become problematic during
>     further processing (e.g. incl. the plots in LaTeX documents).
> 
>     Is there an easy function to strip white space out of character
>     strings (similar to the strip.white=TRUE option in read.table/scan)?
> 
>     I'd appreciate any kind of help and I hope I did not miss anything
>     completely obvious.
> 
>     Thanks,
>     Roland
> 
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Jim Holtman
> Cincinnati, OH
> +1 513 646 9390
> 
> What is the problem you are trying to solve?