CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rstringr
fortnite
fortnite

Reputation: 75

Remove only the blanks in front of the qualitative values of a dataset?

I have a dataset in R with several columns. Some of them contain qualitative values, whose first character is a blank space. I would like to know how I can remove only the blanks in front of the qualitative value. For example, " Living room" should be "Living room". I have thought about implementing the str_replace function and include the pattern that allows to do it, however, I need to perform this procedure in several columns of the dataset.

Any better idea?

str_replace(df$column, *pattern*)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 59

Answers (1)

rdelrossi
rdelrossi

Reputation: 1154

You can use trims() across multiple variables (i.e., columns) of your data frame using mutate() and across() from the dplyr package. First, here's some toy data:

df <- data.frame(
  id = c(1,2, 3),
  var1 = c(" Living Room", " Kitchen", " Great Room"),
  var2 = c(" Guest Room", " Master Bedrom", " Bathroom"),
  var3 = c(" Office", " Laundry Room", " Casita")
)

df %>% glimpse()

Output:

Rows: 3
Columns: 4
$ id   <dbl> 1, 2, 3
$ var1 <chr> " Living Room", " Kitchen", " Great Room"
$ var2 <chr> " Guest Room", " Master Bedrom", " Bathroom"
$ var3 <chr> " Office", " Laundry Room", " Casita"

library(dplyr)

df <- df %>% 
  mutate(
    across(starts_with("var"), trimws)
  ) 

df %>% glimpse()

Output:

Rows: 3
Columns: 4
$ id   <dbl> 1, 2, 3
$ var1 <chr> "Living Room", "Kitchen", "Great Room"
$ var2 <chr> "Guest Room", "Master Bedrom", "Bathroom"
$ var3 <chr> "Office", "Laundry Room", "Casita"

Upvotes: 1

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