I am reading in a bunch of CSVs that have stuff like "sales - thousands" in the title and come into R as "sales...thousands". I'd like to use a regular expression (or other simple method) to clean these up.
I can't figure out why this doesn't work:
#mock data
a <- data.frame(this.is.fine = letters[1:5],
this...one...isnt = LETTERS[1:5])
#column names
colnames(a)
# [1] "this.is.fine" "this...one...isnt"
#function to remove multiple spaces
colClean <- function(x){
colnames(x) <- gsub("\.\.+", ".", colnames(x))
}
#run function
colClean(a)
#names go unaffected
colnames(a)
# [1] "this.is.fine" "this...one...isnt"
but this code does:
#direct change to names
colnames(a) <- gsub("\.\.+", ".", colnames(a))
#new names
colnames(a)
# [1] "this.is.fine" "this.one.isnt"
Note that I'm fine leaving one period between words when that occurs.
Thank you.
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