replace special characters along with the space in list of strings

Question

I have character vector of strings like this :

x <- c("weather is good_today","it. will rain tomorrow","do not* get_angry")

I want to replace all the special characters and space and replace them with "_". I used str_replace all from the stringr package like this :

x1 <- str_replace_all(x,"[[:punct:]]","_")
x2 <- str_replace_all(x1,"\\s+","_")

But can this be done in one single command and I can get the output like this :

x
[1]"weather_is_good_today"
[2]"it_will_rain_tomorrow"
[3]"do_not_get_angry"

Thanks for any help.

Solution 1

try this .

x1 <- str_replace_all(x,"[[:punct:]\\\s]+","_")

I don't have knowledge in R , i suggested the answer based on Regular expression checked withWiki

Solution 2

 gsub('([[:punct:]])|\\s+','_',x)

"weather_is_good_today"  "it__will_rain_tomorrow" "do_not__get_angry" 

Comments

[Mike Williamson]

This answer is actually inaccurate. While "str_replace_all" is a nice function, the actual regexpr should be ([[:punct:]])|\\s+)