delete blanks in R

Question

I'm currently working with several datasets in R. One of these datasets has blanks in every row before every country name such as " Afghanistan". If I now want to merge this dataset with another dataset by country name R can't match the names because of the blanks. I now want to remove these blanks before every name but not between the names: e.g. the blank between "The" and "Bahamas" should stay there and only the blanks before the name should disappear in every row. How can I do that?

Thank you very much for your reply

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 22 '16 at 15:46

2

We can use trimws from base R to remove the leading/lagging spaces in each string. Suppose if the column name is "countryname", we apply the trimws on that column and assign back the output to the same column.

df1$countryname <- trimws(df1$countryname)

answered Mar 22 '16 at 15:46

akrun

874,273
37
540
662

Neat! `substring` should also do it, e.g. `df1$countryname <- substring(df1$countryname,2)`. – Gumeo Mar 22 '16 at 15:50
@Gumeo It could be possible, but we don't know how many white spaces are present for each string. – akrun Mar 22 '16 at 15:52
1

True! OP mentions blanks in plural, so you're right! – Gumeo Mar 22 '16 at 15:53
1

Worked all fine Thank you very much – michaelbally Mar 22 '16 at 16:45

delete blanks in R

1 Answers1