Hi All, I am using xlsx package to extract and clean data from an Excel Workbook. I ran into a strange behavior that I don’t understand. The gsub doesn’t work inside the loop but does outside the loop as shown on my code.. Tried to Google for help but nothing came up.
My code loads and reads data from sheets in the workbook as a list of data frames and assign them names. I wanted to replace the numbers with spaces inside each part of the description column on each data frame using gsub. Example data: Date description number 12/12/12 AAAA234BBB 1 1/3/12 cccc65bb35ff 2 2/7/13 234abababab 3 I want to have the description column to be like this. AAAA BBB Cccc bb ff abababab My code MyFile <- "C:/Users/name/Documents/Testing2.xlsx" MyWBook <- loadWorkbook(MyFile) MySNames <- list(names(getSheets (MyWBook))) NumSheets <- length(getSheets(MyWBook)) for (i in 1:NumSheets) { MySNames[[i]] <-read.xlsx(MyFile,i,as.data.frame=TRUE,header=TRUE,keepFormulas=FALSE,stringsAsFactors=FALSE) gsub("'|-|[0-9]","",MySNames[[i]]$Description) } The gsub function above doesn’t work, but when I tried the function outside the loops, as shown below, it worked. gsub("'|-|[0-9]","",MySNames[[2]]$Description) Thanks in advance--EK ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.