Question

Does anyone have a trick to remove trailing spaces on variables with gsub?

Below is a sample of my data. As you can see, I have both trailing spaces and spaces embedded in the variable.

county <- c("mississippi ","mississippi canyon","missoula ",
            "mitchell ","mobile ", "mobile bay")  

I can use the following logic to remove all spaces, but what I really want is to only move the spaces at the end.

county2 <- gsub(" ","",county)

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You could use an regular expression:

 county <- c("mississippi ","mississippi canyon","missoula ",
        "mitchell ","mobile ", "mobile bay")  
 county2 <- gsub(" $","", county, perl=T)

$ stand for the end of your text sequence, therefore only trailing spaces are matched. perl=T enables regular expressions for the match pattern.
For more on regular expression see ?regex.