How to replace many special characters with “something plus special characters” in R

Question

I have this sentence that contains \"& / ?\".

c = \"Do Sam&Lilly like yes/no questions?\"

I want to add a whitespace before and af

Answer 1

Seems like you mean this,

> c <- "Do Sam&Lilly like yes/no questions?"
> gsub("([^[:alnum:][:blank:]])", " \\1 ", c)
[1] "Do Sam & Lilly like yes / no questions ? "

[^[:alnum:][:blank:]] negated POSIX character class which matches any character but not of an alphanumeric or horizontal space character. BY putting the pattern inside a capturing group, it would capture all the special characters. Replacing the matched special chars with space+\\1 (refers the characters which are present inside the first group) + space will give you the desired output. You could use [:space:] instead of [:blank:] also.