remove (non-breaking) space character in string in

Question

This question seems to make it easy to remove space characters in a string in R. However when I load the following table I'm not able to remove a space between two numbers (eg.11 846.4):

require(XML)
library(RCurl)
link2fetch = 'https://www.destatis.de/DE/ZahlenFakten/Wirtschaftsbereiche/LandForstwirtschaftFischerei/FeldfruechteGruenland/Tabellen/AckerlandHauptfruchtgruppenFruchtarten.html'

theurl = getURL(link2fetch, .opts = list(ssl.verifypeer = FALSE) ) # important!
area_cult10 = readHTMLTable(theurl, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
area_cult10 = data.table::rbindlist(area_cult10)

test = sub(',', '.', area_cult10$V5) # change , to . 
test = gsub('(.+)\\s([A-Z]{1})*', '\\1', test) # remove LETTERS
gsub('\\s', '', test) # remove white space?

Why can't I remove the space in test[1]? Thanks for any advice! Can this be something else than a space character? Maybe the answer is really easy and I'm overlooking something.

Answer 1

You may shorten the test creation to just 2 steps and using just 1 PCRE regex (note the perl=TRUE parameter):

test = sub(",", ".", gsub("(*UCP)[\\s\\p{L}]+|\\W+$", "", area_cult10$V5, perl=TRUE), fixed=TRUE)

Result:

 [1] "11846.4" "6529.2"  "3282.7"  "616.0"   "1621.8"  "125.7"   "14.2"   
 [8] "401.6"   "455.5"   "11.7"    "160.4"   "79.1"    "37.6"    "29.6"   
[15] ""        "13.9"    "554.1"   "236.7"   "312.8"   "4.6"     "136.9"  
[22] "1374.4"  "1332.3"  "1281.8"  "3.7"     "5.0"     "18.4"    "23.4"   
[29] "42.0"    "2746.2"  "106.6"   "2100.4"  "267.8"   "258.4"   "13.1"   
[36] "23.5"    "11.6"    "310.2"  

The gsub regex is worth special attention:

• (*UCP) - the PCRE verb that enforces the pattern to be Unicode aware
• [\\s\\p{L}]+ - matches 1+ whitespace or letter characters
• | - or (an alternation operator)
• \\W+$ - 1+ non-word chars at the end of the string.

Then, sub(",", ".", x, fixed=TRUE) will replace the first , with a . as literal strings, fixed=TRUE saves performance since it does not have to compile a regex.