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I am using a file that relies on user input. Of course this input is inconsistent and I am not sure what the best way to deal with this? I am working with numbers, which are I have read in as character:

mydata$output1
    [1] "PP150" NA "50,376.45\r\n" "40096.21" "43721.59" NA NA "27282272.16" NA

"50,376.45\r\n" actually shows up as a simple number in the preview, i have (in my limited experience) never seen anything similiar. How can i create a numeric vector out of this?

I want to get:

[1] "PP150" NA "50376.45" "40096.21" "43721.59" NA NA "27282272.16" NA
Waldi
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Nneka
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1 Answers1

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You can use gsub to remove characters that you don't want :

x <- c("PP150",NA, "50,376.45\r\n","40096.21","43721.59",NA,NA,"27282272.16", NA)

gsub('[,\r\n]', '', x)
#[1] "PP150"   NA  "50376.45" "40096.21" "43721.59"  NA  NA   "27282272.16" NA

The final output would still be a string since "PP150" is not a number.

Ronak Shah
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