CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rgsub
Prajna
Prajna

Reputation: 149

How to use gsub to replace a value with another?

I have a column in a data frame which has salutation ,i.e. Title .

When i take summary of the column I get the summary like below:

DR. DR MS. Ms. MS 
--------------------
6  20  31  12  21

I planned to merge DR. as DR and MS. Ms. a MS.

So the code I wrote was 

gsub("DR\\.", "DR",df$TITLE)
gsub("M[s/S]\\.","MS",df$TITLE)

but by this am not able to get the summary.... result of summary turns to be :

 Length     Class      Mode 
----------------------------
 6189     character   character

wherein I wanted the result of the summary to be

DR  MS
--------
26  64

How do I achieve this. Whats the error I am doing here ?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 525

Answers (1)

akrun
akrun

Reputation: 887183

We could use fixed = TRUE and change the 'TITLE' to upper case so that we have only two categories

df$TITLE <- factor(toupper(sub(".", "", df$TITLE, fixed = TRUE)))

When we apply sub/gsub, the factor class changes to character and summary gives frequency/count for factor class and Length for character class columns. So, we need to wrap it with factor or use table

table(df$TITLE)
summary(df$TITLE)

Upvotes: 1

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