Other messiness
As we discussed in this chapter's preface, there are countless ways that a dataset may be messy. There are many other messy situations and solutions that we couldn't discuss at length here. In order that you, dear reader, are not left in the dark regarding custodial solutions, here are some other remedies which you may find helpful along your analytics journey:
OpenRefine
Though OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) doesn't have anything to do with R per se, it is a sophisticated tool for working with and for cleaning up messy data. Among its numerous, sophisticated capabilities is the capacity to auto-detect misspelled or mispecified categories and fix them at the click of a button.
Regular expressions
Suppose you find that there are commas separating every third digit of the numbers in a numeric column. How would you remove them? Or suppose you needed to strip a currency symbol from values in columns that hold monetary values so that you can compute with them as numbers. These...