How to replace a space by semicolon between two words with gsub()

Question

I have a problem to solve and I can’t write the correct regex. I want to add the semicolon between two emails:

ex <- "[email protected] [email protected]"

#resultado esperado:
[1] "[email protected];[email protected]"

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Here it comes:

ex <- "[email protected] [email protected]"

# Com o gsub()
gsub(pattern = "[[:blank:]]",
     replacement = ";",
     x =  ex)

# Com str_replace_all(), que eu prefiro
library(stringr)
str_replace_all(string = ex,
                pattern = "[[:blank:]]",
                replacement = ";")

You could do that too:

str_replace_all(string = ex,
                pattern = "[ ]",
                replacement = ";")

Or else this:

str_replace_all(string = ex,
                pattern = "[[:space:] ]",
                replacement = ";")

[[:blank:]] works to eliminate all types of white space, including tabs, etc. With [ ] (a gap between brackets) you only remove the same common space. And with [[:space:]] it is possible to delete spaces, tabs and also line breaks.

Answer 2

Another simpler option would be:

ex <- "[email protected] [email protected]"

new_ex <- gsub(" ", ";", ex)

new_ex