Replace all occurrences of a string in a data frame

dataframe r

I'm working on a data frame that has non-detects which are coded with '<'. Sometimes there is a space after the '<' and sometimes not e.g. '<2' or '< 2'. I'd like to remove every occurrence of the space.

Example:

data <- data.frame(name = rep(letters[1:3], each = 3), var1 = rep('< 2', 9), var2 = rep('<3', 9))

  name var1 var2 
1    a  < 2   <3
2    b  < 2   <3
3    c  < 2   <3

This is where I've got to:

I can extract all the values and make the new strings but I can't put them back in the data frame.

index <- str_detect(unlist(data), '<')
index <- matrix(index, nrow = 3)

data[index] 
#[1] "< 2" "< 2" "< 2" "<3"  "<3"  "<3" 

replacements <- str_replace_all(data[index], "<[ ]+","<") 
replacements
#[1] "<2" "<2" "<2" "<3" "<3" "<3"

data[index] <- replacements

#Error in `[<-.data.frame`(`*tmp*`, index, value = c("<2", "<2", "<2",  : 
#  unsupported matrix index in replacement

If you are only looking to replace all occurrences of "< " (with space) with "<" (no space), then you can do an lapply over the data frame, with a gsub for replacement:

> data <- data.frame(lapply(data, function(x) {
+                  gsub("< ", "<", x)
+              }))
> data
  name var1 var2
1    a   <2   <3
2    a   <2   <3
3    a   <2   <3
4    b   <2   <3
5    b   <2   <3
6    b   <2   <3
7    c   <2   <3
8    c   <2   <3
9    c   <2   <3

Equivalent to "find and replace." Don't overthink it.

Try it with one:

library(tidyverse)
df <- data.frame(name = rep(letters[1:3], each = 3), var1 = rep('< 2', 9), var2 = rep('<3', 9))

df %>% 
  mutate(var1 = str_replace(var1, " ", ""))
#>   name var1 var2
#> 1    a   <2   <3
#> 2    a   <2   <3
#> 3    a   <2   <3
#> 4    b   <2   <3
#> 5    b   <2   <3
#> 6    b   <2   <3
#> 7    c   <2   <3
#> 8    c   <2   <3
#> 9    c   <2   <3

Apply to all

df %>% 
  mutate_all(funs(str_replace(., " ", "")))
#>   name var1 var2
#> 1    a   <2   <3
#> 2    a   <2   <3
#> 3    a   <2   <3
#> 4    b   <2   <3
#> 5    b   <2   <3
#> 6    b   <2   <3
#> 7    c   <2   <3
#> 8    c   <2   <3
#> 9    c   <2   <3

If the extra space was produced by uniting columns, think about making str_trim part of your workflow.

Created on 2018-03-11 by the reprex package (v0.2.0).

Replace all occurrences of a string in a data frame

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