How to replace \\n with a space from dataframe column? (escape sequence)

Question

I am trying to replace all "\n" with a space in char strings in a column of data in R but not having much luck. (I also will need to get rid of all single backslashes with nothing but haven't made it that far yet.

An example of a row of column text is:

["Morals right down \\nthe drain?\"]

Here is my code:

df <- read.csv("Text.csv")
df <- df %>% select (text_info) #removing unwanted columns

The following doesn't work it doesn't do anything that I can see:

df  <-gsub("\\n", " ", df$text_info)

This almost works, but leaves one backslash:

df  <-gsub("\\\\n", " ", df$text_info)

Result: ["Morals right down \ the drain?\"]"]}

any help is appreciated.

jdobres · Accepted Answer · 2022-09-28 18:21:32Z

1

R 4.0.0 and later support raw strings, which gets around the sometimes confusing need to escape (or double escape) certain characters.

Raw strings are delineated by surrounding the string like so: r'(my_string_here)'. Applying this to your example:

text <- "Morals right down \\nthe drain?"

gsub(r'(\\n)', ' ', text)

[1] "Morals right down  the drain?"

answered Sep 28, 2022 at 18:21

jdobres

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8 Comments

ThreatworkAnalyst Over a year ago

I can't really tell if this works, it transforms it into a list, which i use df <- data.frame(df) to transform it back into a dataframe, but it comes back as a df of 1 observation and 1 variable looking like the data is corrupted. Any clues?

jdobres Over a year ago

Can you provide the first few rows of the data frame via dput(head(df))?

jdobres Over a year ago

From your example, it looks like you're assigning the output of gsub to df itself, whereas I think you want to assign into df$text_info.

ThreatworkAnalyst Over a year ago

structure(list(df = "c(\"NULL\", \"NULL\", \"{\\\"4\\\":[\\\"[\\\\\\\"Morals right down \\\\\\\\nthe drain?\\\\\\\"]\\\"]}\"

jdobres Over a year ago

I think you left off some of the dput output. It would be best if you could edit your original post to include it.

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