How to replace empty string with NA in R dataframe?

Question

My first approach was to use na.strings=\"\" when I read the data in from a csv. This doesn\'t work for some reason. I also tried:

df[df==\'\']          


        

Answer 1

I'm not sure why df[df==""]<-NA would have not worked for OP. Let's take a sample data.frame and investigate options.

Option#1: Base-R

df[df==""]<-NA

df
#    One  Two Three Four
# 1    A    A  <NA>  AAA
# 2 <NA>    B    BA <NA>
# 3    C <NA>    CC  CCC

Option#2: dplyr::mutate_all and na_if. Or mutate_if if data frame got multiple types of columns

library(dplyr)

mutate_all(df, list(~na_if(.,"")))

OR

#if data frame other types of character Then
df %>% mutate_if(is.character, list(~na_if(.,""))) 

#    One  Two Three Four
# 1    A    A  <NA>  AAA
# 2 <NA>    B    BA <NA>
# 3    C <NA>    CC  CCC

Toy Data:

df <- data.frame(One=c("A","","C"), 
                 Two=c("A","B",""), 
                 Three=c("","BA","CC"), 
                 Four=c("AAA","","CCC"), 
                 stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

df
#   One Two Three Four
# 1   A   A        AAA
# 2       B    BA     
# 3   C        CC  CCC