R/is.blank.R

In crazybilly/ucbudar: A collection of functions and variables for working with data at UC Berkeley UDAR

#' is.blank
#'
#' tests a vector, returning TRUE if values are NA, NULL, blank strings or NAN. Also returns `TRUE` for strings that are entirely a combinate of spaces and dashes, eg. "-" or " - ", or are "()-", often used as an empty phone number.
#' @param x a vector to test for blank values
#' @return a vector of logical values, where TRUE indicates blank values
#' @export

is.blank  <- function(x) {

  is.na(x) | !nzchar(x) | is.null(x) | is.nan(x) | grepl("^\\(\\)-$",x) | grepl("^\\s*$", x) | grepl("^(-| )*$", x)

}