Removing Whitespace From a Whole Data Frame in R

Question

I\'ve been trying to remove the white space that I have in a data frame (using R). The data frame is large (>1gb) and has multiple columns that contains whi

Answer 1

A lot of the answers are older, so here in 2019 is a simple dplyr solution that will operate only on the character columns to remove trailing and leading whitespace.

library(dplyr)
library(stringr)

data %>%
  mutate_if(is.character, str_trim)

## ===== 2020 edit for dplyr (>= 1.0.0) =====
df %>% 
  mutate(across(where(is.character), str_trim))

You can switch out the str_trim() function for other ones if you want a different flavor of whitespace removal.

# for example, remove all spaces
df %>% 
  mutate(across(where(is.character), str_remove_all, pattern = fixed(" ")))