R change $xxx.xx to xxx.xx for both positive and negative numbers but don't round

Question

I have a df where columns 2 and beyond are dollar amounts such as $1004.23, ($1482.40), $2423.94 etc. Similar to the example below:

> df
  id   desc    price
         


        

Answer 1

I might approach this more like the following:

dat <- read.table(text = "id   desc    price
1  0    apple   $1.00
2  1    banana  ($2.25)
3  2    grapes  $1.97",sep = "",header = TRUE,stringsAsFactors = FALSE)

dat$neg <- ifelse(grepl("^\\(.+\\)$",dat$price),-1,1)
dat$price1 <- with(dat,as.numeric(gsub("[^0-9.]","",price)) * neg)

> dat
  id   desc   price neg price1
1  0  apple   $1.00   1   1.00
2  1 banana ($2.25)  -1  -2.25
3  2 grapes   $1.97   1   1.97

...where if you're doing this for multiple columns, you probably wouldn't store the +/- info in the data frame each time, but you get the basic idea.