Replace specific characters within strings

Question

I would like to remove specific characters from strings within a vector, similar to the Find and Replace feature in Excel.

Here are the data I start with:<

Answer 1

You do not need to create data frame from vector of strings, if you want to replace some characters in it. Regular expressions is good choice for it as it has been already mentioned by @Andrie and @Dirk Eddelbuettel.

Pay attention, if you want to replace special characters, like dots, you should employ full regular expression syntax, as shown in example below:

ctr_names <- c("Czech.Republic","New.Zealand","Great.Britain")
gsub("[.]", " ", ctr_names)

this will produce

[1] "Czech Republic" "New Zealand"    "Great Britain"