how to delete spaces in specific elements of a vector?

Question

I have this vector:

x <- c("a", " b", "c", "d", " e", "f")

There are spaces in x[c(2,5)]

How to delete the spaces to get all elements without spaces?, like this:

x <- c("a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f")

Thanks

Answer 1

You can use a gsub:

gsub(" ", "", x)

Note that this approach will remove any spaces in the elements of x, not only those at the beginning or end of each element.

Answer 2

Try using

library(stringr)
str_trim(x)

Answer 3

Using gsub

gsub("^\\s+|\\s+$","",x)