Question

Im trying to replace villages names in my big data frame (all_health) using gsub, sub and others ,but I keep getting some villages not correctly changed.
for example,
I wanted first to standardise the spelling of all villages (vlg) in the data.
e.g.:

all_health$vlg<-gsub("FALAJALQBA","FALAJALQABAIL",all_health$vlg)
all_health$vlg<-gsub("FALAJALQ","FALAJALQABAIL",all_health$vlg)
all_health$vlg<-gsub("FALAJALQBA","FALAJALQABAIL",all_health$vlg)
all_health$vlg<-gsub("FALAJALQA","FALAJALQABAIL",all_health$vlg)
all_health$vlg<-gsub("FALAJALQBAEIL","FALAJALQABAIL",all_health$vlg)
all_health$vlg<-gsub("FALAJALQBAIL","FALAJALQABAIL",all_health$vlg)
all_health$vlg<-gsub("FALAJALQUBAIL","FALAJALQABAIL",all_health$vlg)

then I wanted to change the resulting village names to another name:

 all_health$vlg<-gsub("FALAJALQABAIL","ALKHUWAYRIYAH",all_health$vlg)

however, when I re-chaecked the names of the villages I noticed new different (missed up) villages such as (ALKHUWAYRIYAHBAILUBAIL) , which looks like a combination of the villages..

I have many other villages behaved just the same.

Am I using the correct function?
would anybody please help me?

Answer 1

If you are simply mapping names to other names, you don’t need sub or gsub. I suspect you’re running into issues because gsub replaces any instance within the string, and you are looking to match the whole string only.

Try doing one of these two:

#ensures matching of whole string by including 
#start-of-line and end-of-line characters
all_health$vlg<-gsub("^FALAJALQBA$","FALAJALQABAIL",all_health$vlg)
#and so on

#or, use %in%:
names.to.replace <- c("FALAJALQBA","FALAJALQ") #include all misspelled names
all_health$vlg[all_health$vlg %in% names.to.replace] <- "FALAJALQABAIL"