[R] Function doesn't work inside loop but works outside

[peter dalgaard]

You need a print() around the gsub(...) when inside a loop.

-pd

> On 5 Mar 2019, at 17:18 , Ek Esawi <esawiek using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> I am using xlsx package to extract and clean data from an Excel
> Workbook. I ran into a strange behavior that I don’t understand. The
> gsub doesn’t work inside the loop but does outside the loop as shown
> on my code.. Tried to Google for help but nothing came up.
> 
> My code loads and reads data from sheets in the workbook as a list of
> data frames and assign them names. I wanted to replace the numbers
> with spaces inside each part of the description column on each data
> frame using gsub.
> 
> Example data:
> Date        description       number
> 12/12/12  AAAA234BBB    1
> 1/3/12      cccc65bb35ff      2
> 2/7/13      234abababab     3
> 
> I want to have the description column to be like this.
>               AAAA BBB
>               Cccc bb ff
>                  abababab
> 
> My code
> 
> MyFile <- "C:/Users/name/Documents/Testing2.xlsx"
> MyWBook <- loadWorkbook(MyFile)
> MySNames <- list(names(getSheets (MyWBook)))
> NumSheets <- length(getSheets(MyWBook))
> 
> for (i in 1:NumSheets) {
>  MySNames[[i]]
> <-read.xlsx(MyFile,i,as.data.frame=TRUE,header=TRUE,keepFormulas=FALSE,stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
>  gsub("'|-|[0-9]","",MySNames[[i]]$Description)
> }
> 
> The gsub function above doesn’t work, but when I tried the function
> outside the loops, as shown below, it worked.
> gsub("'|-|[0-9]","",MySNames[[2]]$Description)
> 
> 
> Thanks  in advance--EK
> 
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-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
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Email: pd.mes using cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd using gmail.com