[R] Removing a space from a string

[Dennis Fisher]

Richard

In reply to your “first response”, the text was originally in a Word document and it did NOT contain the errant spaces.  I used read_docx in the textreadr package to access the text.  The spaces were added during that step.  I am copying the maintainer of that package to see if he has any idea as to the source.

Thanks for your regular expression suggestion.

Dennis


Dennis Fisher MD
P < (The "P Less Than" Company)
Phone / Fax: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
www.PLessThan.com <http://www.plessthan.com/>




> On Jul 28, 2020, at 5:11 PM, Richard O'Keefe <raoknz using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The first response has to be "how did the spaces get there
> in the first place?"  Can you fix the process that creates
> the data?  If the process sometimes generates one extra
> space, are you sure it never generates two?
> 
> But let's treat this purely as a regular expression
> problem, where if there is a space before a dot you want
> to delete the first.  In vi(1) you would do
> 
> s/^\([^  .]*\) \([^.]*\)/\1\2/
> 
> but apparently there is *supposed* to be a space before
> the 01, so it is only when there are two or more spaces
> that one should be deleted, so we'd want
> 
> s/^\([^  .]*\) \([^ .]* \)/\1\2/
> 
> I leave converting that to R as an exercise for the reader.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, 29 Jul 2020 at 08:20, Dennis Fisher <fisher using plessthan.com <mailto:fisher using plessthan.com>> wrote:
> R 4.0.2
> OS X
> 
> Colleagues
> 
> I have strings that contain a space in an unexpected location.  The intended string is:
>         “STRING 01.  Remainder of the string"
> However, variants are:
>         “STR ING 01.  Remainder of the string"
>         “STRIN G 01.  Remainder of the string"
> 
> I would like a general approach to deleting a space, but only if it appears before the period.  Any suggestions on a regular expression for this?
> 
> Dennis
> 
> Dennis Fisher MD
> P < (The "P Less Than" Company)
> Phone / Fax: 1-866-PLessThan (1-866-753-7784)
> www.PLessThan.com <http://www.plessthan.com/> <http://www.plessthan.com/ <http://www.plessthan.com/>>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help using r-project.org <mailto:R-help using r-project.org> mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help <https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help>
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html <http://www.r-project.org/posting-guide.html>
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.


	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]