removePeriods: Removes duplicative periods in column names of data.frame

In brooksandrew/Rsenal: Rsenal (arsenal) of assorted R functions developed over the years

Description

When reading in a flat file (csv, txt, etc) that was converted from an Excel spreadsheet, column names often have spaces between words. R reads these spaces as periods. If there are multiple spaces or special characters that are not valid in column names, R replaces with a period. When the data is messy, you sometimes get several consecutive periods or traling periods at the end of column names. I use this function as a coarse tool to standardize this ugliness Periods can then be easily replaced (gsub'ed) with a single character if periods aren't your thing.

Usage

removePeriods(x)

Arguments

df	input data.frame to be aggregated

Value

vector of strings without duplicate periods

Examples

## making some messed up data to fix
data(mtcars)
names(mtcars)[1] <- paste(names(mtcars)[1], '..', sep='')
names(mtcars)[3] <- paste(names(mtcars)[3], '.', sep='')
names(mtcars)[4] <- paste(names(mtcars)[3], '..also.known..as.horsepower', sep='')
removePeriods(names(mtcars))

brooksandrew/Rsenal documentation built on May 13, 2019, 7:50 a.m.