Convert strings to NA — sas_na • tern

SAS imports missing data as empty strings or strings with whitespaces only. This helper function can be used to convert these values to NAs.

Usage

sas_na(x, empty = TRUE, whitespaces = TRUE)

Arguments

x: (factor or character)
values for which any missing values should be substituted.
empty: (flag)
if TRUE, empty strings get replaced by NA.
whitespaces: (flag)
if TRUE, strings made from only whitespaces get replaced with NA.

Value

x with "" and/or whitespace-only values substituted by NA, depending on the values of empty and whitespaces.

Examples

sas_na(c("1", "", " ", "   ", "b"))
#> [1] "1" NA  NA  NA  "b"
sas_na(factor(c("", " ", "b")))
#> [1] <NA> <NA> b   
#> Levels: b

is.na(sas_na(c("1", "", " ", "   ", "b")))
#> [1] FALSE  TRUE  TRUE  TRUE FALSE