How to Convert “space” into “ ” with R

Question

Referring the title, I\'m figuring how to convert space between words to be %20 .

For example,

> y <- \"I Love You\"

How to

Answer 1

The function curlEscape() from the package RCurl gets the job done.

library('RCurl')
y <- "I love you"
curlEscape(urls=y)
[1] "I%20love%20you"

Answer 2

gsub() is one option:

R> gsub(pattern = " ", replacement = "%20", x = y)
[1] "I%20Love%20You"

Answer 3

Another option would be URLencode():

y <- "I love you"
URLencode(y)
[1] "I%20love%20you"

Answer 4

I like URLencode() but be aware that sometimes it does not work as expected if your url already contains a %20 together with a real space, in which case not even the repeated option of URLencode() is doing what you want.

In my case, I needed to run both URLencode() and gsub consecutively to get exactly what I needed, like so:

a = "already%20encoded%space/a real space.csv"

URLencode(a)
#returns: "encoded%20space/real space.csv"
#note the spaces that are not transformed

URLencode(a, repeated=TRUE)
#returns: "encoded%2520space/real%20space.csv"
#note the %2520 in the first part

gsub(" ", "%20", URLencode(a))
#returns: "encoded%20space/real%20space.csv"

In this particular example, gsub() alone would have been enough, but URLencode() is of course doing more than just replacing spaces.