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

[Ek Esawi]

Thank you Peter. That's a dumb question on my part! At least i should
have known that i need an assignment statement.

Thanks again--EK

On Tue, Mar 5, 2019 at 11:36 AM peter dalgaard <pdalgd using gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
> Phone: (+45)38153501
> Office: A 4.23
> Email: pd.mes using cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd using gmail.com
>
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