removing particular character in a column in r

Question

I have a table called LOAN containing column named RATE in which the observations are given in percentage for example 14.49% how can i format the table so that all value in

Answer 1

This can be achieved using the mutate verb from the tidyverse package. Which in my opinion is more readable. So, to exemplify this, I create a dataset called LOAN with a focus on the RATE to mimic the problem above.

library(tidyverse)
LOAN <- data.frame("SN" = 1:4, "Age" = c(21,47,68,33), 
                   "Name" = c("John", "Dora", "Ali", "Marvin"),
                   "RATE" = c('16%', "24.5%", "27.81%", "22.11%"), 
                   stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
head(LOAN)
  SN Age   Name   RATE
1  1  21   John    16%
2  2  47   Dora  24.5%
3  3  68    Ali 27.81%
4  4  33 Marvin 22.11%

In what follows, mutate allows one to alter the column content, gsub does the desired substitution (of % with "") and converts the RATE column to numeric value, keeping the data cleaning flow followable.

LOAN <- LOAN %>% mutate(RATE = as.numeric(gsub("%", "", RATE)))
head(LOAN)
  SN Age   Name  RATE
1  1  21   John 16.00
2  2  47   Dora 24.50
3  3  68    Ali 27.81
4  4  33 Marvin 22.11