consolidate_values: Attempt to Rationalise a Factor Variable (using simple rules)
In brendan-R/brocks: The Personal R Functions of Brendan Rocks

Description Usage Arguments Value Author(s)

consolidate_values aims to do some of the work of the grunt work of rationalising factor levels for you. Using some very simple rules, it will attempt to turn a vector containing what appear to be gramatical variations on common patterns, into one with these rationalised to a smaller set of values.

All strings are converted to the same case (lower, by default)
Spaces around slashes, before commas, or after common currency symbols are removed
All underscores and full stops are replaced with spaces
All continuous whitespace is converted to a single space
All trailing and leading whitespace is removed
Blank values ("") are converted to NA
Any strings which match na_regex are converted to NA.

1 2	consolidate_values(x, case = "lower", na_regex = "no info\|don't know\|<na>\|#na\|n/a\|^[[:space:]]$")

`x`	The `factor` variable which you'd like to consolidate the levels of
`case`	The case which the levels of `x` will be converted to. Can be one of `"lower"`, `"upper"`.
`na_regex`	A regular expression which will be used to set values of `x` to `NA`.