Remove all special characters from a string in R?

Question

How to remove all special characters in a given string in R and replace each special character with a space?

The special characters to remove are: ~!@#$%^&*(){}_+:"<>?,./;'[]-=

Question_2: But how do remove for example these characters from foreign languages: â í ü Â á ą ę ś ć?

Answer 1

To remove all special characters from a string, you can use the string_replace_all function from the stringr package as follows:

To remove all the punctuation characters:

x <- "a1~!@#$%^&*(){}_+:\"<>?,./;'[]-="

str_replace_all(x, "[[:punct:]]", " ")

[1] "a1~   $ ^       +  <>         ="

To remove all the non-alphanumeric characters:

 str_replace_all(x, "[^[:alnum:]]", " ")

[1] "a1 

You can also use the gsub function from the base package as follows:

gsub("[^[:alnum:]]", " ", x)

[1] "a1