R help - Jul 2005 - merge

Hi all,

I have two data frames to merge by a column containing the site names 
(as characters). However, somehow, one of the site names of one data 
frame have fixed length, say 8, so the names sometimes have spaces at 
the end. For example, the site name is "ST", but in one data frame, it
is "ST        ". Therefore, the merge function won't recognize
that "ST"
and "ST       " are the same, so won't merge accordingly.

Is there a easy way to deal with it? Or I should do something during 
data import? (BTW, I imported the data using read.csv)


Thanks!

Ling

trim in package gdata will trim spaces off the beginning and end.


On 7/8/05, Ling Jin <ljin at lbl.gov> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have two data frames to merge by a column containing the site names
> (as characters). However, somehow, one of the site names of one data
> frame have fixed length, say 8, so the names sometimes have spaces at
> the end. For example, the site name is "ST", but in one data
frame, it
> is "ST        ". Therefore, the merge function won't
recognize that "ST"
> and "ST       " are the same, so won't merge accordingly.
> 
> Is there a easy way to deal with it? Or I should do something during
> data import? (BTW, I imported the data using read.csv)
> 
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Ling
> 
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