Remove all special characters from a string in R

Question

How to remove all special characters from string in R and replace them with spaces   Some special characters to remove are           amp          quot  lt  gt         -  I ve tried regex with   punct   pattern but it removes only punctuation marks  Question 2   And how to remove characters from foreign languages like                  a e s c   Answer   Use     alnum    to remove        amp          quot  lt  gt         -  and use   a-zA-Z0-9  to remove also                a e s c in regex or regexpr functions  Solution in base R   x  lt -  quot a1        amp           quot  lt  gt         -  quot   gsub  quot    punct    quot    quot  quot   x     no libraries needed

User · Answer

Convert the Special characters to apostrophe,

Data  <- gsub("[^0-9A-Za-z///' ]","'" , Data ,ignore.case = TRUE)

Below code it to remove extra ''' apostrophe

Data <- gsub("''","" , Data ,ignore.case = TRUE)

Use gsub(..) function for replacing the special character with apostrophe

User · Answer

You need to use regular expressions to identify the unwanted characters   For the most easily readable code  you want the str replace all from the stringr package  though gsub from base R works just as well   The exact regular expression depends upon what you are trying to do   You could just remove those specific characters that you gave in the question  but it s much easier to remove all punctuation characters   x  lt -  a1        amp            lt  gt         -    or whatever str replace all x      punct              The base R equivalent is gsub     punct           x     An alternative is to swap out all non-alphanumeric characters   str replace all x       alnum             Note that the definition of what constitutes a letter or a number or a punctuatution mark varies slightly depending upon your locale  so you may need to experiment a little to get exactly what you want

User · Answer

Instead of using regex to remove those  crazy  characters  just convert them to ASCII  which will remove accents  but will keep the letters   astr  lt -    bcd      o        iconv astr  from    UTF-8   to    ASCII  TRANSLIT     which results in    1   Abcdeacoauu

[regex] Remove all special characters from a string in R?

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