On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 16:50 +0100, Filipe Almeida wrote: > Hi, > > I want to remove all punctuation characters in a string. I was trying it use > a regular expressions but it doesn't work. > Here is a sample os what i want: > > str <- 'ABD - remove de punct, and dot characters.' > str <- gsub('[:punct:]','',str) > str > "'ABD remove de punct and dot characters" > > is there any function that do this kind of thing? > > Thanks to all. > > Filipe Almeida
You almost have it. Just need to double the brackets: > str [1] "ABD - remove de punct, and dot characters." > gsub("[[:punct:]]", "", str) [1] "ABD remove de punct and dot characters" Note the following in ?regex: For example, [[:alnum:]] means [0-9A-Za-z], except the latter depends upon the locale and the character encoding, whereas the former is independent of locale and character set. (Note that the brackets in these class names are part of the symbolic names, and must be included in addition to the brackets delimiting the bracket list.) Most metacharacters lose their special meaning inside lists. To include a literal ], place it first in the list. Similarly, to include a literal ^, place it anywhere but first. Finally, to include a literal -, place it first or last. (Only these and \ remain special inside character classes.) HTH, Marc Schwartz ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html