Cleaning character strings.

Multiple, leading and trailing white spaces as well as wrong encodings may cause serious problems in information dealing with taxonomic names. The function clean_strings get rid of them.

Usage

clean_strings(x, ...)

# S4 method for class 'character'
clean_strings(x, from = "utf8", to = "utf8", ...)

# S4 method for class 'factor'
clean_strings(x, from = "utf8", to = "utf8", ...)

# S4 method for class 'data.frame'
clean_strings(x, from = "utf8", to = "utf8", ...)

Arguments

x

Object to be cleaned.

...

Further arguments passed among methods (not yet in use).

from, to

Arguments passed to iconv().

Value

The same as input x.

Details

This function automatically deletes leading, trailing and multiple white spaces, either in strings (method character), levels (method factor or in single columns (method data.frame).

Author

Miguel Alvarez.

Examples

## Leading, trailing and multiple spaces
clean_strings(" Cyperus    papyrus L.     ")
#> [1] "Cyperus papyrus L."