R: Replace all punctuated letters with normal letters

Question

I am looking for an easy way to replace all punctuated letters with normal letters. For example, I want to change föó to foo. I can do this as such:

gsub("ö|ó","o","föó")

however, it will probably be a lot of manual work to do this for every possible punctuated letter. Is there a way to do this automatically?

The accents and other symbols are called *diacritics* – Henry May 17 '11 at 22:31 — Henry, May 17 '11 at 22:31

score 9 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:26

9

You can try some variation of this:

    cleanString <- function(x){
        tmp <- iconv(x, from="UTF8", to ="ASCII//TRANSLIT")
        gsub("[^[:alpha:]]", "", tmp)
        }

x = "föó"

cleanString(x)

[1] "foo"

idea for using iconv from Remove diacritics from a string

edited May 23 '17 at 12:26

Community

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answered May 17 '11 at 17:18

Greg

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it should take a character vector (i.e. `x = c("föó", "zöó")`) as well. – Greg May 17 '11 at 17:20
Thanks, looks awesome. I get NA when I try it with `ü` though: `cleanString('ü')` – Sacha Epskamp May 17 '11 at 18:21
@Sacha - it works for me. I have a feeling it is going to be system-dependent, unfortunately. – Greg May 17 '11 at 18:42
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@Sacha it seems to work for me on Windows if I change the from argument to `"latin1"` or just leave as `""` (system default). – James May 18 '11 at 09:37

R: Replace all punctuated letters with normal letters

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