replace a specific strings from multiple columns in a dataframe

Question

I want to replace the strings \"aa\" and \"aaa\" in the dataframe below with\"\"

data = data.frame(attr = c(1:4), type1=c(         


        

Answer 1

 dat[2:3] <- lapply(dat[2:3], gsub, pattern = '[a]{2,}', replacement = '')

The result:

> dat
  attr type1 type2
1    1            
2    2     b      
3    3            
4    4     b      

Data used:

dat <- data.frame(attr = c(1:4), type1 = c('aa','b'), type2 = c("aaa", "aa"))