A collection of little helper functions for quick data cleaning in R

clean-headers.R

clean_headers = function(headers) {

  # Make lowercase
  headers = tolower(headers)

  # Replace symbols
  headers = gsub(' ', '', headers, fixed = TRUE)
  headers = gsub('.', '_', headers, fixed = TRUE)
  headers = gsub('[^[:alnum:]_]', '', headers) # remove all symbols except '_'

  return(headers)

}

remove-whitespace.R

remove_whitespace = function(df, side = 'both') {
  # Goes over each element of a df and strips out whitespace.
  # Defaults to stripping out both sides.
  
  require(stringr); require(dplyr)
  
  df_no_whitespace = mutate_each(df, funs(str_trim(., side = side)))
  
  return(df_no_whitespace)
  
}