Question

I am trying to remove everything in a string except spaces dashes(-) and letters.
For example

string1 <- "test-%432string *#$ one!~+"

how do I return “test-string one”

I tried :
gsub("[^a-zA-Z-\s]", "", string1)
to no avail — it removes the space, which should be left.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Try this

/[^\w\-\s]|\d/

That worked for me. You can try it out on rubular.com.
Enjoy.

Or in R form:

gsub("[^\\w\\-\\s]|\\d","",string1,perl = TRUE)
[1] "test-string  one"