Replacing string with greater/smaller than symbol is not replaced - r

Question

I want to clear a table from unwanted characters. The table can be downloaded here freely: https://www.aggdata.com/free/germany-postal-codes
It contains all german postal codes, and since in Germany there are some special characters like ü,ö,ä or ß, I need to swap them to other symbols.
Now let's say I want to replace all "ß" by "ss".
I used this code, collected from different posts in Stack Overflow. My code looks like this:
postal <- read.csv("~/Downloads/de_postal_codes.csv")
postal <- as.data.frame(sapply(postal,gsub,pattern="<df>",replacement="ss"))
When I try to replace other strings for testing like pattern = "Cot" the code works, but not if it contains the <> symbols. What is the problem here?
I am using R 3.3.3 in RStudio 1.0.136 on MacOS 10.13.4.

Answer 1

This seems to work. If you put encoding = "UTF-8" in to the read.table command, you see that <df> comes back as \xdf. I don't know much about this area, but trying this with the original encoding seemed to work. Hope this helps
postal <- read.table("~/Downloads/de_postal_codes.csv", sep = ",", header = TRUE,
stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
postal$Place.Name[4]
postal <- as.data.frame(
sapply(postal, function(x){
gsub(pattern="\xdf", replacement="ss", x=x)
})
)
postal$Place.Name[4]
edit: Also, I don't think you're sapply was doing the trick. The x parameter in gsub is not the first variable when you do ?gsub.
edit2: I'm using windows & 3.5.0 R version