gsub() in R is not replacing ‘.’ (dot)

January 25, 2023 by Tarik

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"

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)