R help - Mar 2025 - Failed to convert data to numeric

Hi Ivan,

Thanks for your solution.

Is there any way to remove all possible "Unicode character" that may
be present in the array at once?

On Mon, Mar 3, 2025 at 12:18?PM Ivan Krylov <ikrylov at disroot.org>
wrote:
>
> ? Mon, 3 Mar 2025 12:08:43 +0530
> Christofer Bogaso <bogaso.christofer at gmail.com> ?????:
>
> > dat2 = c("-24.437285333333300",
"4.850695000000000",
> > "-1.918495666666670",
> >
> > "2.641818000000000", "6.777527666666670",
"3.208084000000000",
> >
> > "4.193287666666670", "0.378257666666667",
"4.658955000000000",
> >
> > "?-9.881474000000000")
> >
> > Now when I try to convert this data to numeric, I got NA as below
> >
> > > as.numeric(dat2)
> >
> >  [1] -24.4372853   4.8506950  -1.9184957   2.6418180   6.7775277
> > 3.2080840
> >
> >  [7]   4.1932877   0.3782577   4.6589550          NA
>
> There's an invisible Unicode character in there, U+FEFF ZERO WIDTH
> NO-BREAK SPACE:
>
> > dat2 |> tail(1) |> tools::showNonASCII()
> 1: <ef><bb><bf>-9.881474000000000
>
> Try as.numeric(gsub('\ufeff', '', dat2)).
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Ivan

? Mon, 3 Mar 2025 13:21:31 +0530
Christofer Bogaso <bogaso.christofer at gmail.com> ?????:
> Is there any way to remove all possible "Unicode character" that
may
> be present in the array at once?
Define a range of characters you consider acceptable, and you'll be
able to use regular expressions to remove everything else. For example,
the following expression should remove everything except ASCII digits,
dots, and hyphen-minus:

gsub('[^0-9.-]+', '', dat2)

There is a brief introduction to regular expressions in ?regex and
various online resources such as <https://regex101.com/>.

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan