Removing " " (empty values) from a Character of Strings - r

Question

I have been looking around for few hours now and have not been able not remove "" from the character of strings below.
c("Final", "A", "7.43", "8.50", "15.93", "2.00",
"1.00", "0.30", "0.37", " 7.43", " 8.50", "0.50", "0.67", " ",
" ", " ", " ", " ", " ", " ", "B", "7.00", "3.77", "10.77",
" 7.00", "1.67", "3.77", " ", " ", " ", " ", " ", " ", " ", " ",
I have many more of these empty values in this dataset and just want to get rid of them before organizing then as a data frame like
Final
A B
7.43 7.43
8.50 8.50
15.93 0.50
2.00 0.67
1.00
0.30
Thanks,

Answer 1

You can use the base grep with values = TRUE. That searches the character vector for a given regex pattern and returns all values where that pattern is found.
You can think about the logic of your pattern a couple ways. One might be to think of it as keeping values with a "word" character, which are letters, numbers, or underscores.
x <- c("Final", "A", "7.43", "8.50", "15.93", "2.00", "1.00", "0.30", "0.37", " 7.43", " 8.50", "0.50", "0.67", " ", " ", " ", " ", " ", " ", " ", "B", "7.00", "3.77", "10.77", " 7.00", "1.67", "3.77", " ", " ", " ", " ", " ", " ", " ", " ")
grep("\\w", x, value = T)
#> [1] "Final" "A" "7.43" "8.50" "15.93" "2.00" "1.00" "0.30"
#> [9] "0.37" " 7.43" " 8.50" "0.50" "0.67" "B" "7.00" "3.77"
#> [17] "10.77" " 7.00" "1.67" "3.77"
Another way is to find values with a character that isn't a space (\\S is the negation of \\s):
grep("\\S", x, value = T)
#> [1] "Final" "A" "7.43" "8.50" "15.93" "2.00" "1.00" "0.30"
#> [9] "0.37" " 7.43" " 8.50" "0.50" "0.67" "B" "7.00" "3.77"
#> [17] "10.77" " 7.00" "1.67" "3.77"
Created on 2018-12-10 by the reprex package (v0.2.1)