String tip: vectorized pattern replacement

Example case

Suppose you have a bunch of really filthy names, which makes you puke… You can go about fixing those with the help of stringi and stringr

Lets say following character vector hosts those filthy names.

filthy <- c("Grains %", "Moisture (gm/kg)", "Plant height (cm)", "White   spaces", "White space  (filth%)")
filthy

## [1] "Grains %"              "Moisture (gm/kg)"      "Plant height (cm)"    
## [4] "White   spaces"        "White space  (filth%)"

Now to get rid of the filth use string manipulation.

filthy %>% 
  stringr::str_squish() %>% # remove any duplicate whitespaces
  stringi::stri_replace_all_fixed(pattern = c(" ", "/", "%",  "(", ")"), 
                                  replacement = c("_", "_per_", "_percent_", "_", "_"), 
                                  vectorize_all = FALSE) %>% # itemwise vector element match for search and replacement
  stringr::str_replace_all("__", "_") %>% 
  stringr::str_replace_all("_$", "")

## [1] "Grains_percent"            "Moisture_gm_per_kg"       
## [3] "Plant_height_cm"           "White_spaces"             
## [5] "White_space_filth_percent"