How to change a symbol within a character string [R] [duplicate]

Question

This question already has an answer here:

Replace a character in a text (1 answer)

Closed 9 years ago.

I have many elements in a column in the format:

Var.24.22918699

Which need to be changed to

Var-24-22918699

Is there an easy way to do this R?

Thanks!

Answer 1

There sure is. gsub is used to replace specific characters in a string using regular expressions.

> x <- "Var.24.22918699"    
> gsub("[.]", "-", x)
## [1] "Var-24-22918699"

Answer 2

Another option:

x <- "Var.24.22918699"  
chartr('.', '-', x)
# [1] "Var-24-22918699"