remove (non-breaking) space character in string
html, linux, r, regex, string
Solution
You may shorten the `test` creation to just 2 steps and using just 1 PCRE regex (note the `perl=TRUE` parameter):
test = sub(",", ".", gsub("(*UCP)[\\s\\p{L}]+|\\W+$", "", area_cult10$V5, perl=TRUE), fixed=TRUE)
Result:
[1] "11846.4" "6529.2" "3282.7" "616.0" "1621.8" "125.7" "14.2"
[8] "401.6" "455.5" "11.7" "160.4" "79.1" "37.6" "29.6"
[15] "" "13.9" "554.1" "236.7" "312.8" "4.6" "136.9"
[22] "1374.4" "1332.3" "1281.8" "3.7" "5.0" "18.4" "23.4"
[29] "42.0" "2746.2" "106.6" "2100.4" "267.8" "258.4" "13.1"
[36] "23.5" "11.6" "310.2"
The `gsub` regex is worth special attention:
- `(*UCP)` - the PCRE verb that enforces the pattern to be Unicode aware
- `[\\s\\p{L}]+` - matches 1+ whitespace or letter characters
- `|` - or (an alternation operator)
- `\\W+$` - 1+ non-word chars at the end of the string.
Then, `sub(",", ".", x, fixed=TRUE)` will replace the first `,` with a `.` as literal strings, `fixed=TRUE` saves performance since it does not have to compile a regex.
Problem
This question seems to make it easy to remove space characters in a string in R. However when I load the following table I'm not able to remove a space between two numbers (eg.`11 846.4`): ``` require(XML) require(RCurl) require(data.table) link2fetch = 'https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Landwirtschaft-Forstwirtschaft-Fischerei/Feldfruechte-Gruenland/Tabellen/ackerland-hauptnutzungsarten-kulturarten.html' theurl = getURL(link2fetch, .opts = list(ssl.verifypeer = FALSE) ) # important! area_cult10 = readHTMLTable(theurl, stringsAsFactors = FALSE) area_cult10 = rbindlist(area_cult10) test = sub(',', '.', area_cult10$V5) # change , to . test = gsub('(.+)\\s([A-Z]{1})*', '\\1', test) # remove LETTERS gsub('\\s', '', test[1]) # remove white space? ``` Why can't I remove the space in `test[1]`? Thanks for any advice! Can this be something else than a space character? Maybe the answer is really easy and I'm overlooking something.