Replacing a value in R data frame based on condition

Question

I am trying to replace the word "United States" with "USA" to colour a choropleth map for a project. This is the code I am using on my data frame:

country_data_map$region[country_data_map$region == "United States"] <- "USA"

tail(country_data_map,20)

but it still prints out

    region  value
<chr>   <chr>
208 Turkmenistan    73,08
209 Turks & Caicos Is       15,67
210 Tuvalu  20,03
211 Uganda  67,83
212 Ukraine 20,34
213 United Arab Emirates    14,51
214 United Kingdom  5,16
215 United States   6,5
216 Uruguay 11,95
217 Uzbekistan  71,1
218 Vanuatu 55,16
219 Venezuela   22,2
220 Vietnam 25,95
221 Virgin Islands  8,03
222 Wallis and Futuna   
223 West Bank   19,62
224 Western Sahara  
225 Yemen   61,5
226 Zambia  88,29
227 Zimbabwe    67,69

Does anyone know what I am doing wrong?

Could you share some actual data, like tail(country_data_map,20). The issue could be a number of things (extra spaces, for example), and a snippet of data would help us copy and paste your data into R and test some things. — Ben Norris
– Ben Norris, Commented Feb 17, 2021 at 16:46
You are doing nothing wrong as far as what you're showing. I can build a data frame with sample data and the conversion is successful using your code. — pwilcox
– pwilcox, Commented Feb 17, 2021 at 16:50

redarah · Accepted Answer · 2021-02-17 16:51:07Z

1

If you're having trouble with sneaky spaces, you could do:

country_data_map$region[stringr::str_detect(country_data_map$region, "United States")] <- "USA"

And that will still work if the value is " United States" or "United States " or something like that.

answered Feb 17, 2021 at 16:51

redarah

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