# How to remove rows based on blanks in a column from a data frame in R?

R ProgrammingServer Side ProgrammingProgramming

Sometimes data is incorrectly entered into systems and that is the reason we must be careful while doing data cleaning before proceeding to analysis. A data collector or the sampled unit might enter blank to an answer if he or she does not find an appropriate option for the question. This also happens if the questionnaire is not properly designed or blank is filled by mistake. Also, if we have categorical variable then a control category might be filled with blank or we may want to have a blank category to use a new one at later stage. Whatever the reason behind, an analyst faces such type of problems. These blanks are actually inserted by using space key on computers. Therefore, if a data frame has any column with blank values then those rows can be removed by using subsetting with single square brackets.

## Example1

Consider the below data frame:

Live Demo

> set.seed(24)
> x1<-sample(c(" ",1:5),20,replace=TRUE)
> x2<-rnorm(20,4,1.25)
> df1<-data.frame(x1,x2)
> df1

## Output

  x1   x2
1 2 3.413674
2 1 3.581267
3 2 5.920315
4 4 4.762493
5 1 4.645420
6 5 3.907114
7 1 3.243554
8 1.862944
9 3 3.664134
10 3.189261
11 3.882362
12 4 3.893074
13 4 4.149414
14 3.854630
15 4 2.820216
16 4 3.957828
17 3 3.268216
18 4 4.766064
19 1 5.896403
20 4.821726

Removing rows with blanks:

Live Demo

## Output

 y1 y2
1 1 2
2 0 4
5 0 6
6 0 5
7 0 7
8 0 3
9 1 1
10 1 6
11 2 7
12 2 5
13 0 5
15 0 5
16 0 3
17 1 4
18 0 4
19 2 2
Published on 23-Nov-2020 10:23:22