suggestion add function that deals with excel currencies

[marcoblume]

Hi,

thank you for the package. clean_names() has been really helpful.

Would it be possible to add a function that deals with the currencies formats that exist in excel and correctly transforms the strings into numeric values?

As far as I can see these are the most currencies format that excel offers

$100.12
-$222.22
($222.22)
100.12 £
-222.22 £

Thanks in advance

[sfirke]

Hi Marco,

Thanks for the note and idea. Have you tried readr::parse_number()? It handles all of the above instances except that if you want the wrapping parentheses to indicate negative, you'd need to first replace a leading parenthesis with a negative sign using gsub or similar.

[marcoblume]

Hi,

thanks for the answer. I have been recommending your package to colleagues of mine who are not that familiar with R, who often read in Excel data. Your package has been a blessing for them as it helps them get started right away thanks to clean_names().
gsub is a little too daunting for them at this stage and as you said parse_number() does almost the entire job just falls short on the (222$) numbers but I'll write a function for them that will do that for them.

[sfirke]

Sounds good. Here's a lead for your function to handle the numbers in parentheses: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5068705/processing-negative-number-in-accounting-format looks like lots of other folks have run into this so maybe you can adapt from another user's code or package.