Remove All Special Characters from String in R

In this article, we are going to remove all special characters from strings in R Programming language. 

For this, we will use the str_replace_all() method to remove non-alphanumeric and punctuations which is available in stringr package.

Installation

To install this library type the below command in the terminal.

install.packages("stringr")  

We will remove non-alphanumeric characters by using str_replace_all() method.

Syntax: str_replace_all(string, "[^[:alnum:]]", "")

where

• string is the input string
• [^[:alnum:]] is the parameter that removes the non-alphanumeric characters.

Example 1: R program to remove non-alphanumeric characters from the string

# load the stringr package
library("stringr")

# string
string = "a37935fguiegfkeu#$^VYVJ&(*&TFYJ"

# display original string
print(string)

# remove non alphanumeric characters
print(str_replace_all(string, "[^[:alnum:]]", ""))

Output:

[1] "a37935fguiegfkeu#$^VYVJ&(*&TFYJ"
[1] "a37935fguiegfkeuVYVJTFYJ"

Example 2: Remove the punctuations from the string

Syntax: str_replace_all(string, "[[:punct:]]", "")

Where, [[:punct:]: This will remove the punctuations from the string

# load the stringr package
library("stringr")

# string
string = "a37935fguiegfkeu#$^VYVJ&(*&TFYJ"

# display original string
print(string)

# remove punctuations characters
print(str_replace_all(string, "[[:punct:]]", ""))

Output:

[1] "a37935fguiegfkeu#$^VYVJ&(*&TFYJ"
[1] "a37935fguiegfkeu$^VYVJTFYJ"