eeptools (version 1.2.5)

remove_char: A function to replace an arbitrary character like a "*" in redacted data with an NA in R

Description

Redacted education data files often have a "*" character. When importing into R this is a problem, which this function solves in a simple step by replacing "*" with NA, and then converting the vector to numeric.

Usage

remove_char(x, char)

Value

Returns a vector of the same length as the input vector that is numeric with NAs in place of the character.

Arguments

x

a vector of data that should be numeric but contains characters indicating redaction forcing R to read it as character

char

the character string that should be removed from the vector.

Author

Jared E. Knowles

Examples

a <- c(1, 5, 3, 6, "*", 2, 5, "*", "*")
b <- remove_char(a, "*")
as.numeric(b)