R/remove_char.R

In jknowles/eeptools: Convenience Functions for Education Data

##' A function to replace an arbitrary character like a "*" in redacted data with an NA in R
##' @description  Redacted education data files often have a "*" character. 
##' When importing into R this is a problem, which this function solves in a simple 
##' step by replacing "*" with NA, and then converting the vector to numeric.
##' @param x a vector of data that should be numeric but contains characters 
##' indicating redaction forcing R to read it as character
##' @param char the character string that should be removed from the vector.
##' @return Returns a vector of the same length as the input vector that is numeric 
##' with NAs in place of the character.
##' @author Jared E. Knowles
##' @note Future versions could be modified to accommodate other indicators of 
##' redacted data.
##' @keywords manip
##' @export
##' @examples
##' a <- c(1, 5, 3, 6, "*", 2, 5, "*", "*")
##' b <- remove_char(a, "*")
##' as.numeric(b)
remove_char <- function(x, char){
  char <- paste0("\\", char)
  x <- gsub(char, NA, x)
}