Apply mgsub function on whole data.frame in R

Question

I often work with tables full with special characters (fe á,ľ,š,č,ť,ž,ý,á,í,é,... etc.). I found very useful function called mgsub which can do simultaneous multiple string replacement. I works well of vector, however I am struggling to apply which function to whole dataframe.

Function mgsub work like this:

library(mgsub)
mgsub::mgsub("...A čo i tam dušu dáš v tom boji divokom: Mor ty len, a voľ nebyť, ako byť otrokom.",
             pattern = c(".","A","č","š","á",":",",","ľ","ť","M"," "),
         replacement = c("","a","c","s","a","","","","t","m",""), fixed = TRUE)
[1] "acoitamdusudasvtombojidivokommortylenavonebytakobytotrokom"

But how to apply this function to whole data.frame? For example on this data.frame...

my.df <- data.frame(v1 = c("...A čo i tam dušu","dáš v tom boji"),
                    v2 = c("divokom:","Mor ty len,"),
                    v3 = c("a voľ nebyť,","ako byť otrokom."))

                  v1          v2               v3
1 ...A čo i tam dušu    divokom:     a voľ nebyť,
2     dáš v tom boji Mor ty len, ako byť otrokom.

I tried to aplly lapply. but it gives only errors...

data.frame(lapply(my.df, mgsub::mgsub,
                  pattern = c(".","A","č","š","á",":",",","ľ","ť","M"," "),
                  replacement = c("","a","c","s","a","","","","t","m",""), fixed = TRUE))
Error in nchar(string) : 'nchar()' requires a character vector

Any suggestions are welcome.

Answer 1

The issue is that the columns are factor and mgsub requires a character input. According to ?mgsub

string - a character vector where replacements are sought

---

Either convert all the columns to character class

my.df[] <- lapply(my.df, as.character)

Or use type.convert

my.df <- type.convert(my.df, as.is = TRUE) 

Or use stringsAsFactors = FALSE while creating the data.frame as the default option in data.frame is stringsAsFactors = TRUE

my.df <- data.frame(v1 = c("...A čo i tam dušu","dáš v tom boji"),
                    v2 = c("divokom:","Mor ty len,"),
                    v3 = c("a voľ nebyť,","ako byť otrokom."), 
         stringsAsFactors = FALSE)