How to remove single quote from a string in R?

Question

In a data frame I have text like

"X1" "X2"
"1" 53 "'[email protected]'"
"2" 54 "'[email protected]'"
"3" 55 "'[email protected]'"
"4" 56 "'[email protected]'"

How do I remove the single quotes from the string in 2nd column?

Solution 1

To replace text, use (g)sub:

result <- gsub("'", '', yourString)

The function is vectorised so you can apply it directly to your data frame without the need for a loop or an apply:

df$X2 <- gsub("'", '', df$X2)

Solution 2

 df[,2] <- gsub("'", '', df[,2], fixed=TRUE)

I think fixed is the default, but it never hurts to be explicit.

Apologies, read the title of the post as "How to remove (one) single quote from a string in R?"

Solution 3

I know the question states otherwise, but what he actually wants to do is to unwrap this 2nd column, that is to remove tailing and leading single quotes. This can be done with a slightly enhanced regex:

gsub("(^')|('$)", "", df$X2)

Comments

[Konrad Rudolph]

fixed=TRUE is not the default but in this case it makes no difference. However, sub alone won’t work here, OP needs gsub.