Question

I want to replace space with tab in a text variable.

For example something like:

space <- "123 4 56 789"
tab <- sub("[[:space:]]+$", "[[:space:]]+$", x)
print(tab)

Answer 1

Does this work?

x <- "123 4    56 789"
x <- gsub("^\\s+|\\s+$", "", x) #eliminate trailing and leading spaces
tab <- gsub(" +", "\t", x, ) #sub out spaces between for \t
cat(tab)