R How to Handle Special Characters in sub, grepl & regexp (Example Code)
In this article, I’ll show how to deal with special characters in functions such as gsub, grepl, and gregexpr in the R programming language.
Example Data
my_string <- "AAAAAAA[BBBBB" # Exemplifying character string my_string # Showing character string in RStudio console # [1] "AAAAAAA[BBBBB" |
my_string <- "AAAAAAA[BBBBB" # Exemplifying character string my_string # Showing character string in RStudio console # [1] "AAAAAAA[BBBBB"
Example: Using Double Backslash within sub() Function to Replace Special Characters
sub("[", " Something Else ", my_string) # Replacement doesn't work # Error in sub("[", " Something Else ", my_string) : # invalid regular expression '[', reason 'Missing ']'' |
sub("[", " Something Else ", my_string) # Replacement doesn't work # Error in sub("[", " Something Else ", my_string) : # invalid regular expression '[', reason 'Missing ']''
sub("\[", " Something Else ", my_string) # Replacement works fine # [1] "AAAAAAA Something Else BBBBB" |
sub("\[", " Something Else ", my_string) # Replacement works fine # [1] "AAAAAAA Something Else BBBBB"