escaping - How do I strip dollar signs ($) from data/ escape special characters in R?

Question

I've been using gsub("toreplace","replacement", myvector) to clean out data in R. While this works for commas and the like, removing "$" has no effect. So if I do gsub("$","",myvector) all the dollar signs remain in place.

I think this is because $ is a special character in R. I tried escaping it "$" but that yields the same result (no effect). And I couldn't find a resource on escaping special characters in R.

Obviously I should do this in preprocessing. But I was wondering if anyone out there knew how to either a) escape special characters in R b) get rid of pesky $ in R directly. For science.

Answer 1

You have to escape it twice, first for R, second for the regex.

gsub('\$', '', c("a$a", "bb$"))
[1] "aa" "bb"

See ?Quotes for details on quoting and escaping.