How to Remove Dollar Signs in R?

The gsub() method in base R is used to replace all the matches of a pattern from a string. In case the pattern is not contained within the string, it will be returned as it is. It takes regular expression as a parameter which is used to replace with a new specified string.

Syntax:

gsub(pattern, replacement, string)

Parameters : 

• pattern: the string to be matched
• replacement: the string to be used for replacement
• string: string

Example:

In this example, the  $ sign in the string variable is replaced with “” (blank character) using the gsub() method. 

R

# declaring a string
str = "$Remove Dollar $Sign"
print("Original String")
print(str)

# removing dollar sign from string
str_mod = gsub("\\$", "", str)

print("Modified String")
print(str_mod)

Output

[1] "Original String" 
[1] "$Remove Dollar $Sign" 
[1] "Modified String" 
[1] "Remove Dollar Sign"

Dollar signs can also be removed from a dataframe column or row, by using the gsub() method. All the instances of the $ sign are removed from the entries contained within the data frame. 

Example:

In this example, all the instances of $ sign is replaced with a blank character in col2 of the data frame. 

R

# declaring a data frame
data_frame < - data.frame(col1=c(1: 5),
                          col2=c("Ge$eks$", "$For",
                                 "Geeks", "$I$s", "$Fun$"))
print("Original DataFrame")

print(data_frame)

# removing $ sign from data frame column
data_frame$col2 = gsub("\\$", "", data_frame$col2)
print("Modified DataFrame")

print(data_frame)

Output

A string vector can also be specified containing different strings which may or may not contain $ sign within it. The gsub() method can also be used to remove occurrences of $ sign from the vector. 

Example:

R

# declaring a data frame
str_vec < - c("Ge$eks$", "$For", "Geeks",
              "$I$s", "$Fun$")
print("Original String")
print(str_vec)

# removing $ sign from data frame column
str_mod = gsub("\\$", "", str_vec)

print("Modified String")
print(str_mod)

Output

[1] "Original String" 
[1] "Ge$eks$" "$For"    "Geeks"   "$I$s"    "$Fun$"  
[1] "Modified String" 
[1] "Geeks" "For"   "Geeks" "Is"    "Fun"