Replace space between two words with an underscore in a vector

Question

I have words, Genus species, and I want an underscore to replace the space between the two strings in R

Input:

>data$species
Genus species
         


        

Answer 1

You should use gsub:

data$species <- gsub(" ", "_", data$species)

Answer 2

We can use sub from base R

data$species <- sub(" ", "_", data$species)

Or with chartr from base R

data$species <- chartr(" ", "_", data$species)

---

Or using tidyverse

library(tidyverse)
data %>%
    mutate(species = str_replace(species, " ", "_"))