Remove empty strings from named vector in R

Question

Does anyone know how to remove an empty string from the named vector? I tried the following but could not get what I wanted.

X <- c('a', NA, '', 'b')
names(X) <- rep("d",4)

then I applied one the stringi function as fallow

stringi::stri_remove_empty(names(X)) # it return this  "a" NA  "b"
stringi::stri_remove_empty(X) # it return just the names "d" "d" "d" "d"

But actually I want get as following

 d   d   d
"a" "na" "b"

appreciate your help

best adr

akrun · Accepted Answer · 2022-01-31 16:40:31Z

3

We may use nzchar from base R to create a logical expression i.e. TRUE for non-blank and FALSE for blank ("")

X[nzchar(X)]
d   d   d 
"a"  NA "b"

If we want to remove both missing (NA) and blank

X[nzchar(X) & complete.cases(X)]
  d   d 
"a" "b"

answered Jan 31, 2022 at 16:40

akrun

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