删除除撇号和R中的字内短划线之外的标点符号

Question

I know how to separately remove punctuation and keep apostrophes:

gsub( "[^[:alnum:]']", " ", db$text )  

or how to keep intra-word dashes with the tm package:

removePunctuation(db$text, preserve_intra_word_dashes = TRUE)

but I cannot find a way to do both at the same time. For example if my original sentence is:

"Interested in energy/the environment/etc.? Congrats to our new e-board! Ben, Nathan, Jenny, and Adam, y'all are sure to lead the club in a great direction next year! #obama #swag"

I would like it to be:

"Interested in energy the environment etc Congrats to our new e-board Ben Nathan Jenny and Adam y'all are sure to lead the club in a great direction next year obama swag"

Of course, there will be extra white spaces, but I can remove them later.

I will be grateful for your help.

Answer 1

Use character classes

gsub("[^[:alnum:]['-]", " ", db$text)

## "Interested in energy the environment etc Congrats to our new e-board Ben Nathan Jenny and Adam y'all are sure to lead the club in a great direction next year obama swag"

Answer 2

I like David Arenberg's answer. If you need another way, you could try:

library(qdap)

text <- "Interested in energy/the environment/etc.? Congrats to our new e-board! Ben, Nathan, Jenny, and Adam, y'all are sure to lead the club in a great direction next year! #obama #swag"

gsub("/", " ",strip(text, char.keep=c("-","/"), apostrophe.remove=F,lower.case=F))
#[1] "Interested in energy the environment etc Congrats to our new e-board Ben Nathan Jenny and Adam y'all are sure to lead the club in a great direction next year obama swag"

or

library(gsubfn)
 clean(gsubfn("[[:punct:]]", function(x) ifelse(x=="'","'",ifelse(x=="-","-"," ")),text))
#[1] "Interested in energy the environment etc Congrats to our new e-board Ben Nathan Jenny and Adam y'all are sure to lead the club in a great direction next year obama swag"

clean is from qdap . Used to remove escaped characters and space