How to convert string into legitimate file name in R?

[jeromyanglim]

I have a database with participant names and I want to use the participant name to generate file names. However, there are few names like "A/Prof" where illegal characters for file names appear. How can I cleanse these raw names.

[jeromyanglim]

One simple strategy:

gsub('[^a-zA-Z]', '', x)

This will remove any characters in x that are not lower or upper case letters between a and Z.

• gsub stands for global substitution (i.e., not just the first occurrence of a match
• '[^a-zA-Z]' This is pattern that matches any characters not (carat ^ is the not operator) in the specified ranges ie., lower case letters (a-z) and upper case letters (A-Z).
• the replacement text is an empty string ''

Limitations: a broader range of characters are permitted in file names, and this does not deal with long strings.