Remove punctuation from text (except the symbol &)

user_1306892 0
Viewed 95

I need to remove punctuation from the text:

 data <- "Type the command AT&W enter. in order to save the new protocol on modem;"
 gsub('[[:punct:] ]+',' ',data)

This solution gives the result

[1] "Type the command AT W enter in order to save the new protocol on modem "

This is not the desired result because I would like to save &, hence:

[1] "Type the command AT&W enter in order to save the new protocol on modem "
r regex string
4 Answers

You could try a user defined regex consisting of anything that is not an $ or an alpha numeric:

data <- "Type the command AT&W enter. in order to save the new protocol on modem;"

gsub('[^&[:alnum:] ]+',' ',data)
user_123676750

What about doing the inverse? i.e. replacing everything that is not a letter, a digit or a & with an empty string:

gsub("[^[:alnum:][:space:]&]", "", data)
# [1] "Type the command AT&W enter in order to save the new protocol on modem"
user_134606020

Here's another regex, which literally means "find all punctuations except &".

gsub("[^\\P{P}&]", "", data, perl = T)
[1] "Type the command AT&W enter in order to save the new protocol on modem"
user_166474960

Another possible solution, based on stringr:

library(stringr)
 
str_remove_all(data, "(?!&)[[:punct:]]")

#> [1] "Type the command AT&W enter in order to save the new protocol on modem"
user_115644870
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