How to replace "|" in R

Question

I have a dataframe which contains

"HYD_SOA_UNBLOCK~SOA_BLOCK-UK|SOA_BLOCK-DE||SOA_BLOCK-FR||SOA_BLOCK-IT||SOA_BLOCK-ES|"

I want the result to be -

I tried:

leadtemp$collate = gsub("||","|",leadtemp$collate)

but it is not working.

Please help me replace "||" with "|"

Just add `fixed = TRUE` to your `gsub()`. – MrFlick Mar 12 '18 at 17:40 — MrFlick, Mar 12 '18 at 17:40

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 12 '18 at 18:15

As MrFlick suggested, include fixed = TRUE in your gsub statement. The problem occurs because "|" is a Regular Expression operator. Using fixed = TRUE tells gsub to assume the pattern is a string and not a RegEx.

leadtemp$collate = gsub("||","|",leadtemp$collate, fixed=TRUE)

Another (although more complicated) way of doing it would be to escape all the |s:

leadtemp$collate = gsub("\\|\\|","\\|",leadtemp$collate)

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Mar 12 '18 at 18:49

0

| is a metacharacter. As you can read here, metacharacters need to be escaped out of with a \. \ is also a metacharacter so it must be escaped out of in the same way. So whenever you want to refer to a | in a string, you have to put \\|. This should make your code work:

leadtemp$collate = gsub("\\|\\|","\\|",leadtemp$collate)

edited Mar 12 '18 at 18:49

Val

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answered Mar 12 '18 at 18:15

Ben Berger

1

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 12 '18 at 18:15

Try:

gsub("[|]{2}", "|", leadtemp$collate)

I have defined character class comprising the pipe character and forced gsub to look for exactly two occurrences.Result is:

"HYD_SOA_UNBLOCK~SOA_BLOCK-UK|SOA_BLOCK-DE|SOA_BLOCK-FR|SOA_BLOCK-IT|SOA_BLOCK-ES|"

How to replace "|" in R

3 Answers3