CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rfunctionmultiple-columnsapplygsub
T. Veiga
T. Veiga

Reputation: 191

Apply and function a gsub in a lots of columns

I am kind of new to R and I want to apply the gsub function in columns 6 to 12 in my data frame called x. However, I am kind of stuck. I started using:

gsub("\\.", "",x[,c(6:12)])

But then it returned only a few rows. Then, I tried to use this:

x1<-apply(x,c(6:12),function(x) gsub("\\.", "",x))

But I got the following error:

Error in if (d2 == 0L) { : missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed

Also tried this:

for (i in x[,c(6:12)]) 
{a<-data.frame(gsub("\\.", "",i))}

Does anybody have a tip or a solution? It would also be great if someone showed me how to use an apply function and for.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 6076

Answers (3)

AndrewGB
AndrewGB

Reputation: 16856

Adding the solution using apply from the comments, as this one really helped me:

x1 <- apply(x[,6:12], 2, function(x) gsub("\\.", "",x))

Upvotes: 0

Serhii
Serhii

Reputation: 422

Here is a solution in a data.table way. It worth considering when a table is big and time is a critical factor.

library(data.table)     # load library
x = as.data.table(x)    # convert data.frame into data.table
cols = names(x)[6:12]   # define which columns to work with
x[ , (cols) := lapply(.SD, function(x) {gsub("\\.", "", x)}), .SDcols = cols] # replace
x # enjoy results

Upvotes: 4

Thierry
Thierry

Reputation: 18487

Here is another solution. It returns all the columns of the original dataframe

library(dplyr)
mutate_at(x, 6:12, gsub("\\.", "", .))

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions