R/text_cleaning_functions.R

In JMLuther/tabletools: Helpful Tools to Make html Tables

#' Functions to clean character strings 
#'
#' `txt_clean_nonascii` removes non-standard characters from text, but keeps space, -, and . by default, using regex matching.
#' Default matching can be overridden by `regex` option.
#' 
#' @param string character string, or vector of character strings which will be cleaned 
#' @param regex defaults to remove all non-ascii text characters, but keeping a few  
#'
#' @returns A character string or vector, now stripped of any non-matching values
#' @export
#'
#' @examples
#' test_strings <- c("\"The Erlenmeyer Flask\"‡", "\"My Struggle\"‡", "\"Founder's Mutation\"", "\"Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster\"",
#' "\"Home Again\"", "\"Babylon\"", "\"My Struggle II\"‡" )
#' test_strings
#' txt_clean_nonascii(test_strings)

txt_clean_nonascii <- function(string, regex = "[^[:alnum:][:blank:]+?&/\\-\\.]") {
  gsub(regex, "", string)
  }