Removing character elements from a vector

Question

I was trying to figure out how to remove several characters from a list (not one per one):

-First I converted my data.frame (single column) in a list A of characters with A2[]<-lapply(A,as.character)

-then I converted it to A3<-unlist(A2, recursive = TRUE, use.names = TRUE) producing a vector which contains all the atomic components which occur in A1 .

Finally I use str_remove(A3, ".") to remove, in this case, the points. See below:

     A1      A2      A3      A4      A5      A6      A7      A8      A9     A10 
    "*"     "*"     "*"     "*"     "*"     "*"     "*"     "*"     "*"     "*" 
    A11     A12     A13     A14     A15     A16     A17     A18     A19     A20 
    "*"   "=1-"   "*C:"     "I"     "."     "."     "."     "."     "."     "." 
    A21     A22     A23     A24     A25     A26     A27     A28     A29     A30 
    "."     "2"   "V7b"     "."     "."     "."     "."     "I"     "."     "." 

The problem is that applying str_remove() other elements of the vector as "*" get lost. Is that normal?

 [1] ""     ""     ""     ""     ""     ""     ""     ""     ""     ""    
 [11] ""     "1-"   "C:"   ""     ""     ""     ""     ""     ""     ""    
 [21] ""     ""     "7b"   ""     ""     ""     ""     ""     ""     ""  

Is there a better way to do that? It is simply to remove "." of that column:

12     =1-
13     *C:
14      I
15      .
16      .
17      .
18      .
19      .
20      .
21      .
22      2
23    V7b
24      .
25      .
26      .
27      .
28      I
29      .
30      .
31      .

to get:

=1-
*C:
I
2
V7b
I

Answer 1

The period is a meta character (see here ), so try escaping it like so-

str_remove(A3, “\\.”)

Edit:

You can remove multiple characters from a vector of arbitrary length with str_remove_all , which removes every match from the supply character vector. You can also supply str_remove_all multiple patterns to match at once, allowing you to do multiple operations with only one line of code.

library(stringr)
a <- c("hello. this. is. text","this. is. also. text","here. is. even. more. text")
remove_these <- c("\\.","text")
str_remove_all(a, paste(remove_these, collapse = "|"))

This returns:

"hello this is "     "this is also "      "here is even more "