R help - Jun 2013 - A strange issue with GSub

Greetings, 

Apologies if this turns out to be a very silly question, but because I am the
only person learning/using R at my workplace, I have no choice but to ask folks
here.
I have been using Gsub to change some expressions in my Corpus object. After
applying the gsub function, say
newCorpus<- gsub("game","war",newCorpus, fixed=TRUE)
an object of class character is returned by the gsub function, as is
understandable, like so:
[1] this is the text of the 1st document....[1000] this is the text of the
1000th document.
However, all such text is enclosed as such:
[1] "c(\"this is the text of the 1st document.\",
\"\\a\")" ...[1000] "c(\"this is the text of the 1000th
document.\", \"\\a\")"
The worst part is that I tried recreating the problem with another example to
post here, but I face no such problem with the example. So, after banging my
head against the computer for two days now, I still remain clueless as to why
this is happening. I was wondering if somebody had an explanation to why this
happens? That will be very helpful.
The only thing I can think of is that I had initially converted MS word
documents into txt files, and then imported them using R's plain text
reader. Could this be the issue?

Thanks. 		 	   		  
	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

On Jun 15, 2013, at 7:46 AM, Ali Arslan Kazmi wrote:
> Greetings, 
> 
> Apologies if this turns out to be a very silly question, but because I am
the only person learning/using R at my workplace, I have no choice but to ask
folks here.
> I have been using Gsub to change some expressions in my Corpus object.
After applying the gsub function, say
> newCorpus<- gsub("game","war",newCorpus, fixed=TRUE)
> an object of class character is returned by the gsub function, as is
understandable, like so:
> [1] this is the text of the 1st document....[1000] this is the text of the
1000th document.
> However, all such text is enclosed as such:
> [1] "c(\"this is the text of the 1st document.\",
\"\\a\")" ...[1000] "c(\"this is the text of the 1000th
document.\", \"\\a\")"
> The worst part is that I tried recreating the problem with another example
to post here, but I face no such problem with the example. So, after banging my
head against the computer for two days now, I still remain clueless as to why
this is happening. I was wondering if somebody had an explanation to why this
happens? That will be very helpful.
> The only thing I can think of is that I had initially converted MS word
documents into txt files, and then imported them using R's plain text
reader. Could this be the issue?
> 
> Thanks. 		 	   		  
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
You are misspelling the gsub function name. You are not describing your process
with enough detail to replicate it. You are using packages that you are not
naming. I suspect you are using gsub with an item of a class for which it was
never intended. Consider this:
> mydf <- data.frame(a=c("this is a test", "another
test"), b=c("athird", "a fourth"))
> gsub("test","tester", mydf)
[1] "c(2, 1)" "c(2, 1)"

Please read the Posting Guide. Please make your example reproducible.

-- 

David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA