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I have (sometimes incomplete) data on addresses that looks like this:
data <- c("1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC",
",Siem Reap,FC,", "11 Wall Street, New York, NY", ",Addis Ababa,FC,")
where I need to remove the first and/or last character if either one of them are a comma.
Avinash Raj was able to help me with this on S.O. and the question turned out to be a popular one, so I’ll show the solution here:
> data <- c("1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC",
+ ",Siem Reap,FC,", "11 Wall Street, New York, NY", ",Addis Ababa,FC,")
> gsub("(?<=^),|,(?=$)", "", data, perl=TRUE)
[1] "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC"
[2] "Siem Reap,FC"
[3] "11 Wall Street, New York, NY"
[4] "Addis Ababa,FC"
Pattern explanation:
(?<=^),In regex(?<=)called positive look-behind. In our case it asserts What precedes the comma must be a line start^. So it matches the starting comma.|Logical OR operator usually used to combine(ie, ORing) two regexes.,(?=$)Lookahead aseerts that what follows comma must be a line end$. So it matches the comma present at the line end.
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