Remove character in R-CodePudding

I have created a third column to concatenate V1 and V2 in this way:

dataframe = x
    V1   V2   
[1]          
[2] 2A   3S   
[3] 2A    

x$V3<-paste(x$V1,x$V2,sep=",")

I obtain this

dataframe = x
    V1   V2   V3
[1]          "character(0),character(0)" 
[2] 2A   3S   2A,3S
[3] 2A        2A,character(0)"

How do I remove the word character(0) and the other symbols like "," and " ?

CodePudding user response：

We can replace the character(0) value with empty string when concatenating the two columns:

x$V3 <- gsub("^,|,$", "", paste(ifelse(identical(x$V1, character(0)), " ", x$V1),
                                ifelse(identical(x$V2, character(0)), " ", x$V2),
                                sep=","))

CodePudding user response：

To avoid getting unwanted symbols/values when combining columns, you can use tidyr function unite() and get the desired result. I have attached an example below:

x[is.na(x)] <- "" # to remove NAs before combining
new_x <- unite(x, "V3", c("V1", "V2"), sep = " ", remove = FALSE)

If your initial table doesn't have the NAs, then you can use followed by unite() funcyion:

x[x=="character(0)"] <- "NA" # to convert to NA
x[x=="character(0)"] <- "" # to instantly convert to empty string