[R] regexpr mystery can not remove trailing spaces

[Matt Shotwell]

On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 08:07 -0400, Petr PIKAL wrote:
> Dear all
> 
> I encountered strange problem with regexpr replacement
> 
> I made this character object
> 
> str <- "02.06.10 12:40     "
> 
> > str(str)
>  chr "02.06.10 12:40      "
> 
> I read in an object which seems to be quite similar
> 
> > str(as.character(becva$V1)[1])
>  chr "02.06.10 12:40   "
> 
> However I can not remove trailing spaces from it
> 
> > sub(' +$', '', as.character(becva$V1[1]))
> 
> [1] "02.06.10 12:40   "
> > sub(' +$', '', str)
> [1] "02.06.10 12:40"
> >
> 
> Do somebody have an idea what to do?

Could the white space in the string be a tab? If so, the space character
will not match. Try something that matches multiple white space, like

sub('\\w+$', '', as.character(becva$V1[1]))

or

sub('[[:blank:]]+$', '', as.character(becva$V1[1]))




Matt Shotwell
Graduate Student
Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
Medical University of South Carolina

> 
> $version.string
> [1] "R version 2.12.0 Under development (unstable) (2010-04-25 r51820)"
> 
> on Windows
> 
> Regards
> Petr
> 
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