[R] gsub difficulty

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Any of these will replace every dot with a space:

x <- "a.b.c"
gsub("\\.", " ", x)
gsub("[.]", " ", x)
gsub(".", " ", x, fixed = TRUE)
chartr(".", " ", x)

See ?regex for more info on regular expressions.

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 1:16 PM, Charles Annis, P.E.
<Charles.Annis at statisticalengineering.com> wrote:
> Greetings R-ians:
>
> I know what doesn't work but I don't know why, nor how to remedy things.
>
> I have a character string containing "." which I want to replace with " "
>
> gsub(".", " ", file.label) replaces the every character with a blank.
>
> However gsub(".xls", " ", file.label) replaces ".xls" with a blank as
> expected.
>
> It appears that "." is some kind of wild-card.  How do I tell gsub that a
> period is just a period?
>
> Thanks.
>
>
> Charles Annis, P.E.
>
> Charles.Annis at StatisticalEngineering.com
> phone: 561-352-9699
> eFax:  614-455-3265
> http://www.StatisticalEngineering.com
>
>
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