Removing all "$" from an entire data frame - r

Question

I have a df with several columns that have dollar values preceded by the "$" like so:
> str(data)
Classes ‘data.table’ and 'data.frame': 196879 obs. of 32 variables:
$ City : chr "" "" "" "" ...
$ Company_Goal : chr "" "" "" "" ...
$ Company_Name : chr "" "" "" "" ...
$ Event_Date : chr "5/14/2016" "9/26/2015" "9/12/2015" "6/3/2017" ...
$ Event_Year : chr "FY 2016" "FY 2016" "FY 2016" "FY 2017" ...
$ Fundraising_Goal : chr "$250" "$200" "$350" "$0" ...
$ Name : chr "Heart Walk 2015-2016 St. Louis MO" "Heart Walk 2015-2016 Canton, OH" "Heart Walk 2015-2016 Dallas, TX" "FDA HW 2016-2017 Albany, NY WO-65355" ...
$ Participant_Id : chr "2323216" "2273391" "2419569" "4088558" ...
$ State : chr "" "OH" "TX" "" ...
$ Street : chr "" "" "" "" ...
$ Team_Average : chr "$176" "$123" "$306" "$47" ...
$ Team_Captain : chr "No" "No" "Yes" "No" ...
$ Team_Count : chr "7" "6" "4" "46" ...
$ Team_Id : chr "152788" "127127" "45273" "179207" ...
$ Team_Member_Goal : chr "$0" "$0" "$0" "$0" ...
$ Team_Name : chr "Team Clayton" "Cardiac Crusaders" "BIS - Team Myers" "Independent Walkers" ...
$ Team_Total_Gifts : chr "$1,230 " "$738" "$1,225 " "$2,145 " ...
$ Zip : chr "" "" "" "" ...
$ Gifts_Count : chr "2" "1" "2" "1" ...
$ Registration_Gift: chr "No" "No" "No" "No" ...
$ Participant_Gifts: chr "$236" "$218" "$225" "$0" ...
$ Personal_Gift : chr "$0" "$0" "$0" "$250" ...
$ Total_Gifts : chr "$236" "$218" "$225" "$250" ...
$ MATCH_CODE : chr "UX000" "UX000" "UX000" "UX000" ...
$ TAP_LEVEL : chr "X" "X" "X" "X" ...
$ TAP_DESC : chr "" "" "" "" ...
$ TAP_LIFED : chr "" "" "" "" ...
$ MEDAGE_CY : chr "0" "0" "0" "0" ...
$ DIVINDX_CY : chr "0" "0" "0" "0" ...
$ MEDHINC_CY : chr "0" "0" "0" "0" ...
$ MEDDI_CY : chr "0" "0" "0" "0" ...
$ MEDNW_CY : chr "0" "0" "0" "0" ...
- attr(*, ".internal.selfref")=<externalptr>
I am trying to remove all of the "$". I have been unable to do so- I have tried the suggestions provided in this post as well as this one but in both situations- the data remains unchanged...
Help?

Answer 1

The dollar sign is a reserved character in regular expressions (see here for more info). The gsub() function assumes the pattern is a regex by default.
You have to escape the dollar sign using backslashes (\\$) to match a literal $.
#sample data
df = data.frame(Team_Average = c("$176", "$123", "$306"),
Name = c("Heart Walk 2015-2016 St. Louis MO",
"Heart Walk 2015-2016 Canton, OH",
"Heart Walk 2015-2016 Dallas, TX"),
stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
df[] = lapply(df, gsub, pattern="\\$", replacement="")
Alternatively you can use gsub's option of fixed=TRUE to match the pattern literally.
df[] = lapply(df, gsub, pattern="$", replcement="", fixed=TRUE)

Answer 2

The other answers work nicely on the example provided. However, if the data set contained any numeric columns, then running gsub() or stringr::str_replace_all() via lapply() would coerece numeric columns to character:
library(stringr)
library(dplyr)
d <- data_frame(
x = c("$200", "$191.40", "80.12"),
y = c("$test", "column", "$foo"),
z = 1:3
)
d[] <- lapply(d, gsub, pattern = "\\$", replacement = "")
# A tibble: 3 x 3
x y z
<chr> <chr> <chr>
1 200 test 1
2 191.40 column 2
3 80.12 foo 3
Note the class of z above.
Here is a tidyverse approach to removing $ from all character columns:
d %>%
mutate_if(
is.character,
funs(str_replace_all(., "\\$", ""))
)
# A tibble: 3 x 3
x y z
<chr> <chr> <int>
1 200 test 1
2 191.40 column 2
3 80.12 foo 3