[R] Is a string all blanks?

Peter Langfelder peter.langfelder at gmail.com
Wed Aug 3 02:13:19 CEST 2011


On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 5:07 PM, John Sorkin <JSorkin at grecc.umaryland.edu> wrote:
> windows 7
> R 2.12.1
>
> Is there any easy way to determine if a sting contains nothing but blanks? I need to check a series of strings of various length.
>
> OneBlank <- " "
> TwoBlanks <- "  "
> ThreeBlanks <- "   "
> NoBlanks <- "NoBlanks"
>
> What I want would be a function such as ALLBLANKS that would return the following
> ALLBLANKS(OneBlank) would be true (or 1)
> ALLBLANKS(TwoBlanks) would be true (or 1)
> ALLBLANKS(ThreeBlanks) would be true (or 1)
> ALLBLANKS(NoBlanks) would be false (or 0)


ALLBLANKS = function(x) {x==paste(rep(" ", nchar(x)), collapse = "")}

> ALLBLANKS(" ")
[1] TRUE
> ALLBLANKS("     ")
[1] TRUE
> ALLBLANKS("  A   ")
[1] FALSE

HTH,

Peter



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