Replace all occurrences of a string in a data frame

Question

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\

Answer 1

To remove all spaces in every column, you can use

data[] <- lapply(data, gsub, pattern = " ", replacement = "", fixed = TRUE)

or to constrict this to just the second and third columns (i.e. every column except the first),

data[-1] <- lapply(data[-1], gsub, pattern = " ", replacement = "", fixed = TRUE)