R programming - How to remove special characters from a data set?

Question

I have a data set that contains strings and special characters like the one below can be found in the data set.

Special character

How do I remove special characters like the above from my data set?

Answer 1

Use regular expressions to remove unwanted characters, for example:

dataset$textcolumn <- gsub("[^\\w\\s]", "", dataset$textcolumn, perl=TRUE)

to remove everything except word characters and spaces. To do more complex replacements look into the help topic ?regexp .

Also look into the encoding ( Encoding and iconv are helpful here.), maybe the text is correct but the wrong encoding is assumed.