I find this really odd :
pattern <- "[[:punct:][:digit:][:space:]]+"
string <- "a . , > 1 b"
gsub(pattern, " ", string)
# [1] "a b"
library(stringr)
str_replace_all(string, pattern, " ")
# [1] "a > b"
str_replace_all(string, "[[:punct:][:digit:][:space:]>]+", " ")
# [1] "a b"
Is this expected ?
Still working on this, but ?"stringi-search-charclass" says:
Beware of using POSIX character classes, e.g. ‘[:punct:]’. ICU User Guide (see below) states that in general they are not well-defined, so may end up with something different than you expect.
In particular, in POSIX-like regex engines, ‘[:punct:]’ stands for the character class corresponding to the ‘ispunct()’ classification function (check out ‘man 3 ispunct’ on UNIX-like systems). According to ISO/IEC 9899:1990 (ISO C90), the ‘ispunct()’ function tests for any printing character except for space or a character for which ‘isalnum()’ is true. However, in a POSIX setting, the details of what characters belong into which class depend on the current locale. So the ‘[:punct:]’ class does not lead to portable code (again, in POSIX-like regex engines).
So a POSIX flavor of ‘[:punct:]’ is more like ‘[\p{P}\p{S}]’ in ‘ICU’. You have been warned.
Copying from the issue posted above,
string <- "a . , > 1 b"
mypunct <- "[[\\p{P}][\\p{S}]]"
stringr::str_remove_all(string, mypunct)
I can appreciate stuff being locale-specific, but it still surprises me that [:punct:] doesn't even work in a C locale ...