How to use gsub() In R Language
In this approach, we have used apply() function to apply a function to each row in a data frame. The function used which is applied to each row in the dataframe is the gsub() function, this used to replace all the matches of a pattern from a string, we have used to gsub() function to find whitespace(\s), which is then replaced by “”, this removes the whitespaces.
Note: We have wrapped our entire output in as.data.frame() function, it is because the apply() function returns a Matrix object so we need to convert it back into a dataframe.
Syntax: as.data.frame(apply(df,margin, function(x) gsub(“\\s+”, “”, x)))
Parameters:
df: Dataframe object
margin: dimension on which operation is to be applied
function(x): operation to be applied, gsub() in this case.
gsub(): replaces “\s” with “”
Example: R program to remove whitespaces using gsub()
R
df <- data.frame (c1 = c ( " geeks for" , " cs" , "r -lang " ), c2 = c ( "geeks " , "f " , " g" )) df_new <- as.data.frame ( apply (df,2, function (x) gsub ( "\\s+" , "" , x))) df_new |
Output:
c1 c2
1 geeksfor geeks
2 cs f
3 r-lang g
Remove All Whitespace in Each DataFrame Column in R
In this article, we will learn how to remove all whitespace in each dataframe column in R programming language.
Sample dataframe in use:
c1 c2 1 geeks for geeks 2 cs f 3 r -lang g