Replace Multiple Letters with Accents in R (Example)

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to exchange special characters with accents in the R programming language.

The article contains this:

Let’s dive into it:

Creating Example Data

We’ll use the following data as basement for this R programming language tutorial:

x <- "áéèàôî"                    # Create character string
x                                # Print character string
# "áéèàôî"

The previous output of the RStudio console shows the structure of our example data: It’s a character string containing several letters with accents.

Example: Translate Special Characters Using chartr() Function

The following R syntax illustrates how to use the chartr function to remove accents from special characters in R. Have a look at the following R syntax:

chartr("áéèàôî", "aeeaoi", x)    # Apply chartr
# "aeeaoi"

As you can see, we replaced multiple alphabetical letters with accents in one single line of R code.

Video, Further Resources & Summary

Would you like to know more about the handling of letters with accents? Then you might want to have a look at the following video instruction of my YouTube channel. In the video, I explain the content of this post:

The YouTube video will be added soon.

Furthermore, you may want to have a look at some of the other tutorials of this website. You can find some articles about character strings below:

• Remove All Special Characters from String
• Replace Specific Characters in String
• R Functions List (+ Examples)
• The R Programming Language

In summary: You learned in this tutorial how to replace accents of French letters in the R programming language. Tell me about it in the comments, if you have further questions.