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I have a column of a large data frame containing regions sampled. However I have found that a number of the entries contain spaces following the regions name e.g. "East ". This is causing me problems for my analysis as R reads this as a different region to "East". Is there a way I can get rid of these spaces?

I have tried: 

gsub("  ", "", df$Region)

but it doesn't seem to work.

Apologies for my ignorance I am new to R.

Many thanks!

Andrie
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user3489562
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    Your code will replace only occurrences of two spaces, not single spaces. Is this intentional? – Andrie May 20 '14 at 14:45
  • I was trying to indicate a space after where the text would go. when I do: sort(unique(as.character(df$Region))) I still get ones with a space after the text. – user3489562 May 20 '14 at 14:52

1 Answers1

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df$Region <- gsub(" +$", "", df$Region)

+ detects one or more spaces together, and $ detects the end of the string. That way you remove all spaces together, no matter how many there are, but only at the end of the string.

Julián Urbano
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