[SOLVED] How to remove part of characters in data frame column

Issue

I have a data frame as follows (part of a larger set):

data frame

for the column raw$Zipcode I need to remove the two 00 before the Zipcode number for Swedish zipcodes (preferably through a function). I am very new to R and have found gsub and strsplit but can’t seem to make it work:

raw2 <- unlist(strsplit(raw$ZipCode, split="00", fixed=TRUE))[2]

The zeroes are characters as other countries in the data set have letters. How can I remove the first two zeroes in all cases of the two first character letters being zeroes in a column?

Solution

There are multiple ways of doing this:

1. Using as.numeric on a column of your choice.

raw$Zipcode <- as.numeric(raw$Zipcode)

2. If you want it to be a character then you can use stringr package.

library(stringr)
raw$Zipcode <- str_replace(raw$Zipcode, "^0+" ,"")

3. There is another function called str_remove in stringr package.

raw$Zipcode <- str_remove(raw$Zipcode, "^0+")

4. You can also use sub from base R.

raw$Zipcode <- sub("^0+", "", raw$Zipcode)

But if you want to remove n number of leading zeroes, replace + with {n} to remove them.

For instance to remove two 0’s use sub("^0{2}", "", raw$Zipcode).

Answered By – Vishal A.

Answer Checked By – Katrina (BugsFixing Volunteer)