How to remove all whitespace from a string?

Question

So " xx yy 11 22 33 " will become "xxyy112233". How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

In general, we want a solution that is vectorised, so here's a better test example:

whitespace <- " \t\n\r\v\f" # space, tab, newline, 
                            # carriage return, vertical tab, form feed
x <- c(
  " x y ",           # spaces before, after and in between
  " \u2190 \u2192 ", # contains unicode chars
  paste0(            # varied whitespace     
    whitespace, 
    "x", 
    whitespace, 
    "y", 
    whitespace, 
    collapse = ""
  ),   
  NA                 # missing
)
## [1] " x y "                           
## [2] " ← → "                           
## [3] " \t\n\r\v\fx \t\n\r\v\fy \t\n\r\v\f"
## [4] NA

---

The base R approach: gsub

gsub replaces all instances of a string (fixed = TRUE) or regular expression (fixed = FALSE, the default) with another string. To remove all spaces, use:

gsub(" ", "", x, fixed = TRUE)
## [1] "xy"                            "←→"             
## [3] "\t\n\r\v\fx\t\n\r\v\fy\t\n\r\v\f" NA 

As DWin noted, in this case fixed = TRUE isn't necessary but provides slightly better performance since matching a fixed string is faster than matching a regular expression.

If you want to remove all types of whitespace, use:

gsub("[[:space:]]", "", x) # note the double square brackets
## [1] "xy" "←→" "xy" NA 

gsub("\\s", "", x)         # same; note the double backslash

library(regex)
gsub(space(), "", x)       # same

"[:space:]" is an R-specific regular expression group matching all space characters. \s is a language-independent regular-expression that does the same thing.

---

The stringr approach: str_replace_all and str_trim

stringr provides more human-readable wrappers around the base R functions (though as of Dec 2014, the development version has a branch built on top of stringi, mentioned below). The equivalents of the above commands, using [str_replace_all][3], are:

library(stringr)
str_replace_all(x, fixed(" "), "")
str_replace_all(x, space(), "")

stringr also has a str_trim function which removes only leading and trailing whitespace.

str_trim(x) 
## [1] "x y"          "← →"          "x \t\n\r\v\fy" NA    
str_trim(x, "left")    
## [1] "x y "                   "← → "    
## [3] "x \t\n\r\v\fy \t\n\r\v\f" NA     
str_trim(x, "right")    
## [1] " x y"                   " ← →"    
## [3] " \t\n\r\v\fx \t\n\r\v\fy" NA      

---

The stringi approach: stri_replace_all_charclass and stri_trim

stringi is built upon the platform-independent ICU library, and has an extensive set of string manipulation functions. The equivalents of the above are:

library(stringi)
stri_replace_all_fixed(x, " ", "")
stri_replace_all_charclass(x, "\\p{WHITE_SPACE}", "")

Here "\\p{WHITE_SPACE}" is an alternate syntax for the set of Unicode code points considered to be whitespace, equivalent to "[[:space:]]", "\\s" and space(). For more complex regular expression replacements, there is also stri_replace_all_regex.

stringi also has trim functions.

stri_trim(x)
stri_trim_both(x)    # same
stri_trim(x, "left")
stri_trim_left(x)    # same
stri_trim(x, "right")  
stri_trim_right(x)   # same