How do I remove leading tabs/spaces from my character vector?

Question

I have this character vector:

[1] "　　　　　　USD(WorldTotal)"       "　　　　　　JPY(WorldTotal)"      
[3] "　　　　　　EURO(WorldTotal)"      "　　　　　　KRW(WorldTotal)"      
[5] "　　　　　　OTHER(WorldTotal)"     "　　　　　　　　　RUB(WorldTotal)"

and am trying to remove spaces from the vector.

I tried multiple ways to do this,

currency = trimws(currency)
currency = gsub("[[:blank:]]", "", currency)

none of which worked. I don't understand how this is the case. Could someone explain for me?

data = structure(list(currency = c("      USD (World Total)"      , 
NA, "      JPY (World Total)"      , NA, "      EURO (World Total)"      
), Types = c("Amounts(millionUSD)", "Share(%) (%)", "Amounts(millionUSD)", 
"Share(%) (%)", "Amounts(millionUSD)")), row.names = c(NA, -5L
), class = c("tbl_df", "tbl", "data.frame"))

the variable in question is `currency'.

Please provide a reproducible example using `dput`. Here your example is working well. — Clemsang, Sep 09 '19 at 14:55
Currency is a column in the "data" data frame. The syntax is `data$currency<-trimws(data$currency)` — Dave2e, Sep 09 '19 at 16:40
@DaveT: ah no I attached the dataset. I didn't have any error messages. It's just simply that the function didn't solve the problem. — Rainroad, Sep 09 '19 at 19:36

kashiff007 · Answer 1 · 2019-09-09T20:42:56.753

0

This should work:

data$currency <- trimws(data$currency, whitespace = "[\\h\\v\\t ]")

edited Sep 09 '19 at 20:42

answered Sep 09 '19 at 15:06

kashiff007

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Beware that this won’t work in R 3.5, only in R 3.6: `trimws` has no `whitespace` argument before that. – Konrad Rudolph Sep 09 '19 at 15:07
I couldn't make this work either. I just edited my question to give a reproducible example. – Rainroad Sep 09 '19 at 15:41
can you try now, if I understood correctly it should work – kashiff007 Sep 09 '19 at 20:45

How do I remove leading tabs/spaces from my character vector?

1 Answers1