Transforming Empty Strings and White Spaces to NAs

SAS imports missing data as empty strings or white spaces. This helper function replaces the empty strings and white space-only character and levels by NAs.

h_ws_to_na(x)

Arguments

x

(vector) where empty of white space should be transformed to NAs.

Value

character or factor without explicit NA. logical and numeric are returned as character.

Examples

char1 <- c(" ", "    ", "a", "b", "", "")
h_ws_to_na(char1)
#> [1] NA  NA  "a" "b" NA  NA 

fact1 <- as.factor(char1)
h_ws_to_na(fact1)
#> [1] <NA> <NA> a    b    <NA> <NA>
#> Levels: a b

num1 <- c(1:10)
h_ws_to_na(num1)
#>  [1] "1"  "2"  "3"  "4"  "5"  "6"  "7"  "8"  "9"  "10"

logi1 <- c(TRUE, FALSE, NA)
h_ws_to_na(logi1)
#> [1] "TRUE"  "FALSE" NA