R中的管道修剪和gsub

Question

I am able to trim out white space and punctuation in R using the below nested functions:

x <- "    a1~!@#$%^&*(){}_+:\"<>?,./;'[]-=    "

y <- trimws(gsub("[[:punct:]]", "", x)) #returns "a1" as desired

But I'd like to make use of the magrittr / dplyr piping operator (%>%) instead of nesting functions because it makes the code more readable for others, but can't seem to make it work. Here's what I'm trying:

x <- "    a1~!@#$%^&*(){}_+:\"<>?,./;'[]-=    "

z <- gsub("[[:punct:]]", "", x) %>% trimws(x)

Here's the error I'm receiving:

Error in match.arg(which) : 'arg' should be one of “both”, “left”, “right”

This error doesn't make sense to me because leaving out additional arguments to trimws normally removes left and right trailing spaces, so I shouldn't have to specify "both". This error is only thrown when used in conjunction with gsub in the piping syntax.

What am I missing about how piping works? I've reviewed magrittr to no avail.

Answer 1

Try this:

library(magrittr)
x <- "    a1~!@#$%^&*(){}_+:\"<>?,./;'[]-=    "   # input

x %>% 
  gsub(pattern = "[[:punct:]]", replacement = "") %>%
  trimws -> z