gsub() in R is not replacing '.' (dot)

Question

I want to replace dots in \"2014.06.09\" to \"2014-06-09\". I am using gsub() function for it. If

x <-  \"2014.06.09\"         


        

Answer 1

You may need to escape the . which is a special character that means "any character" (from @Mr Flick's comment)

 gsub('\\.', '-', x)
 #[1] "2014-06-09"

Or

gsub('[.]', '-', x)
#[1] "2014-06-09"

Or as @Moix mentioned in the comments, we can also use fixed=TRUE instead of escaping the characters.

 gsub(".", "-", x, fixed = TRUE)