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Problem

I have been working on merging and standardizing several survey datasets. One problem that I'm running across is that there is inconsistent use of punctuation. Sometimes, the research is coded with a standard ', and other times is coded with ’.

For example, the names of the Ivory Coast in French is Côte d'Ivoire. Unfortunately, the data are not uniformly coded across time. As a result, when I run a crosstab, I get this:

country         2008      2009
-------         ----      ----
Cote d'Ivoire    498        0
Cote d’Ivoire     0        502

What I want to get is this:

country         2008      2009
-------         ----      ----
Cote d'Ivoire    498       502

When I try to standardize these to use the ' rather than the ’, I have absolutely no luck. It just doesn't seem to do anything. Here is the code I would use:

data$country[data$country == "Cote d’Ivoire"] <- Cote d'Ivoire

For some reason, I can't seem to figure this out, and it's driving me nuts. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

Thank you!

Yasha
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    firt what does `sum(data$country == "Cote d’Ivoire")` return? – Onyambu Jan 31 '18 at 04:21
  • Well, I think I figure it out! I used `trimws()` to see whether there was perhaps some extra blank space in there, and it seems to have fixed the issue :) – Yasha Feb 25 '18 at 15:08

1 Answers1

2

you can replace a value with another value using gsub 

data$country=gsub("’","'",data$country)

In case it doesnt work you may need to escape the special character using a double backslash 

data$country=gsub("\\’","'",data$country)

See

Remove pattern from string with gsub

Ajay Ohri
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