Question

R cleaning up a character string and converting it into a numeric

I have a character string

abc <-  " 267750Â"

class(abc)
"character"

What to I need to do to abc to get rid of “ ” and convert it from character to numeric.
Perhaps as.numeric will work but I need to get rid of “ ” first.

I want to convert the above to:

abc
267750
class(abc)
 "numeric"

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

You can parse out what you don’t want with regular expressions:

test <- "532.dcx3vds98"
destring <- function(x,keep="0-9.") {
  return( as.numeric(gsub(paste("[^",keep,"]+",sep=""),"",x)) )
}
destring(test)

Returns 532.398.

Edit

This is now in taRifx:

library(taRifx)
test <- "532.dcx3vds98"
destring(test)