Resolved: Find and replace regex pattern across two columns

Question:

I have a dataframe with two columns for two kinds of rates. But the data inconsistency there has made it difficult to differentiate thousand rates from the normal rates. So, I need to find a pattern of {dot}{3digits} and replace the first dot with blank. So I have created a function to take care of that. But the function is not working as expected and I’m getting an error/warning as below. What could be the issue here?

DF <- data.frame(
  PRODUCT_ID = c("A125", "A444", "A744", "B12", "C7", "D1"),
  LOC_1 = c("2.000.00 usd pr. kg", "37.61 usd pr. piece", "46.58 usd pr. item", "327%", "0", NA),
  LOC_2 = c("45.000.00 usd pr. kg", "3.000.00 usd pr. piece", "780.00 usd pr. item", "505%", "0%", NA)
)
> DF
  PRODUCT_ID               LOC_1                  LOC_2
1       A125 2.000.00 usd pr. kg   45.000.00 usd pr. kg
2       A444 37.61 usd pr. piece 3.000.00 usd pr. piece
3       A744  46.58 usd pr. item    780.00 usd pr. item
4        B12                327%                   505%
5         C7                   0                     0%
6         D1                <NA>                   <NA>

# function to remove the thousand dots (2.000.00 => 2000.00)
dutyFormat <- function(x) {
  if(str_detect(x, '\\.\\d{3}')) {
    return(sub('.', '', x, fixed = TRUE))
  } else {
    return(x)
  }
}

DF[,2:3] <- lapply(DF[,2:3], dutyFormat)
Warning messages:
1: In if (str_detect(x, "\\.\\d{3}")) { :
  the condition has length > 1 and only the first element will be used
2: In if (str_detect(x, "\\.\\d{3}")) { :
  the condition has length > 1 and only the first element will be used

> DF
  PRODUCT_ID              LOC_1                 LOC_2
1       A125 2000.00 usd pr. kg   45000.00 usd pr. kg
2       A444 3761 usd pr. piece 3000.00 usd pr. piece
3       A744  4658 usd pr. item    78000 usd pr. item
4        B12               327%                  505%
5         C7                  0                    0%
6         D1               <NA>                  <NA>

My expected output is this:

Answer:

Although your if statement did found patterns of '\\.\\d{3}', the subsequent sub operation did not take consideration of that. It will just remove the first dot.
You could use a regex to find out pattern of '\\.\\d{3}', then capture the digits, and replace the whole thing with the capture group (i.e. the digits).

library(dplyr)

DF %>% mutate(across(starts_with("LOC"), ~gsub("\\.(\\d{3})", "\\1", .x)))

  PRODUCT_ID               LOC_1                 LOC_2
1       A125  2000.00 usd pr. kg   45000.00 usd pr. kg
2       A444 37.61 usd pr. piece 3000.00 usd pr. piece
3       A744  46.58 usd pr. item   780.00 usd pr. item
4        B12                327%                  505%
5         C7                   0                    0%
6         D1                <NA>                  <NA>

If you have better answer, please add a comment about this, thank you!

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