R-gsub从字符串中删除标点符号和数字

Question

I'm trying to remove punctuation and digits from <U+200B>Chandler to become Chandler . This is what I'm currently trying:

df$city <- gsub("[[:punct:]]|[[:digit:]]", "", df$city)

However, it doesn't do anything to change the cell in column 'city' in 'df'. When I search typeof(df), I get 'list'. This might have to do with it?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Second question first, tyepof() will always return list for a data frame, because data frames are really just lists of equal length vectors .

For the first question, it appears you have some Unicode encoded characters in your data. One good way to take care of these is to convert them, perhaps like:

df$city <- iconv(df$city, 'utf-8', 'ascii', sub = '')

It is also possible to gsub out characters on their hex code, like this:

df$city <- gsub('\u200B', '', df$city)

or even a range:

df$city <- gsub('[\u2000-\u20ff]', '', df$city)

But really I think the iconv approach is the way to go. In this usage it will just remove the character rather than render it, but that seems to be what you want.