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Learn Challenge: Compose Your Own Functions | Functional Programming in Practice
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Functions and Functional Programming in R

bookChallenge: Compose Your Own Functions

Task

Swipe to start coding

Create two simple functions and compose them to clean a list of strings.

  • The trim_whitespace function must remove leading and trailing whitespace from each string in the input vector.
  • The to_lowercase function must convert all characters in each string of the input vector to lowercase.
  • The clean_strings function must use both trim_whitespace and to_lowercase to process the input vector and return the cleaned result.

Solution

Note
Definition

The gsub("^\\s+|\\s+$", "", x) command uses regular expressions to clean up strings:

  • ^\\s+ matches one or more whitespace characters at the start of a string;
  • | means 'or';
  • \\s+$ matches one or more whitespace characters at the end of a string.

gsub replaces all matches of these patterns with an empty string (""), effectively removing all leading and trailing spaces from each element in the vector x. This leaves only the inner content of each string untouched.

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Section 3. Chapter 4
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bookChallenge: Compose Your Own Functions

Swipe to show menu

Task

Swipe to start coding

Create two simple functions and compose them to clean a list of strings.

  • The trim_whitespace function must remove leading and trailing whitespace from each string in the input vector.
  • The to_lowercase function must convert all characters in each string of the input vector to lowercase.
  • The clean_strings function must use both trim_whitespace and to_lowercase to process the input vector and return the cleaned result.

Solution

Note
Definition

The gsub("^\\s+|\\s+$", "", x) command uses regular expressions to clean up strings:

  • ^\\s+ matches one or more whitespace characters at the start of a string;
  • | means 'or';
  • \\s+$ matches one or more whitespace characters at the end of a string.

gsub replaces all matches of these patterns with an empty string (""), effectively removing all leading and trailing spaces from each element in the vector x. This leaves only the inner content of each string untouched.

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Section 3. Chapter 4
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