How do I strip dollar signs ($) from data/ escape special characters in R?

user_451683 0
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I've been using gsub("toreplace","replacement", myvector) to clean out data in R. While this works for commas and the like, removing "$" has no effect. So if I do gsub("$","",myvector) all the dollar signs remain in place.

I think this is because $ is a special character in R. I tried escaping it "\$" but that yields the same result (no effect). And I couldn't find a resource on escaping special characters in R.

Obviously I should do this in preprocessing. But I was wondering if anyone out there knew how to either a) escape special characters in R b) get rid of pesky $ in R directly. For science.

r escaping
4 Answers

if you have $ followed by number in set of data columns (e.g. $400,000) there is an easier way that worked like charm for me. data%>% mutate_at(5:6, parse_number) where 5:6 are the data column numbers.

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