Replace characters in column names gsub

Question

I am reading in a bunch of CSVs that have stuff like \"sales - thousands\" in the title and come into R as \"sales...thousands\". I\'d like to use a regular expression (or o

Answer 1

Rich Scriven had the answer:

Define

colClean <- function(x){ colnames(x) <- gsub("\\.\\.+", ".", colnames(x)); x } 

and then do

a <- colClean(a) 

to update a

Answer 2

names(a) <- gsub(x = names(a), pattern = "\\.", replacement = "#")  

you can use gsub function to replace . with another special character like #.