Replacing commas and dots in R

Question

I have a whole column of numbers that include dot separators at the thousands and comma instead of dot as an dismal separator. When I try to create a numeric column out of them, I lose all data. ``` var1 <- c("50,0", "72,0", "960,0", "1.920,0", "50,0", "50,0", "960,0") df <- cbind(var1, var2 = as.numeric(gsub(".", "", as.character(var1)))) ``` and wound up with: ``` var1 var2 [1,] "50,0" NA [2,] "72,0" NA [3,] "960,0" NA [4,] "1.920,0" NA [5,] "50,0" NA [6,] "50,0" NA [7,] "960,0" NA ``` What am I doing wrong?

Accepted Answer

You need to escape the `"."` in your regular expression, and you need to replace the commas with a `"."` before you can convert to numeric.

```
> as.numeric(gsub(",", ".", gsub("\.", "", var1)))
[1]   50   72  960 1920   50   50  960
```

Replacing commas and dots in R

Solution

Problem