I have a character vector d
with alphanumeric characters
d <- c("012309 template", "separate 00340", "00045", "890 098", "3405 garage", "matter00908")
d
[1] "012309 template" "separate 00340" "00045" "890 098" "3405 garage" "matter00908"
How can I remove the leading zeros from all the numbers in R?
as.numeric
will remove all leading zeros only in numeric or integer vectors. I have tried gsub
with regex
but could not get the desired results.
The expected output is as follows
out <- c("12309 template", "seperate 340", "45", "890 98", "3405 garage", "matter908")
out
[1] "12309 template" "seperate 340" "45" "890 98" "3405 garage" "matter908"
You could use a negative lookbehind to eliminate 0 unless preceded by a digit:
> d <- c("100001", "012309 template", "separate 00340", "00045", "890 098", "3405 garage", "matter00908")
> gsub("(?<![0-9])0+", "", d, perl = TRUE)
[1] "100001" "12309 template" "separate 340" "45"
[5] "890 98" "3405 garage" "matter908"
Another way using regex:
> gsub("(^|[^0-9])0+", "\\1", d, perl = TRUE)
[1] "100001" "12309 template" "separate 340" "45"
[5] "890 98" "3405 garage" "matter908"
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