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How do I strip dollar signs ($) from data/ escape special characters in R?

Asked 2011-07-10T06:52:46.840
28

I've been using gsub("toreplace","replacement", myvector) to clean out data in R. While this works for commas and the like, removing "$" has no effect. So if I do gsub("$","",myvector) all the dollar signs remain in place.

I think this is because $ is a special character in R. I tried escaping it "\$" but that yields the same result (no effect). And I couldn't find a resource on escaping special characters in R.

Obviously I should do this in preprocessing. But I was wondering if anyone out there knew how to either a) escape special characters in R b) get rid of pesky $ in R directly. For science.

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21

Use fixed = TRUE:

gsub('$', '', c("a$a", "bb$"), fixed = TRUE)

Then you don't need to worry about any special characters. In stringr, this is implemented a little differently:

library(stringr)
str_replace_all(c("$100","ta$ty"), fixed("$"), "")

Thanks to DiggyF and James for the examples!

answered 2011-07-10T16:53:52.823

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