In R, how to use regex [:punct:] in gsub?
r, regex
Solution
Fellow MontReal user here.
Several options, sames results.
In R Base, just double the brackets
gsub(pattern="[[:punct:]]", test, replacement=" ")
[1] "Low Decarie Etienne"
Package `stringr` has function `str_replace_all` that does that.
library(stringr)
str_replace_all(test, "[[:punct:]]", " ")
Or keep only letters
str_replace_all(test, "[^[:alnum:]]", " ")
Problem
Given ``` test<-"Low-Decarie, Etienne" ``` I wish to replace all punctuation with space ``` gsub(pattern="[:punct:]", x=test, replacement=" ") ``` but this produces ``` "Low-De arie, E ie e" ``` where no punctuation is replaced and apparently random letters are removed (though they may be associated with punctation as t for tab and n for next line).