Convert blank and boilerplate non-answers to NA

Survey exports are littered with empty strings and standard "non-answer" options such as "Prefer not to answer". This helper turns those into real NA values so they drop out of counts and summaries, replacing the repetitive filter(x != "", x != "Prefer not to answer") idiom.

Usage

na_blank(x, also = ezrsurvey_default("na_answers"), trim = TRUE)

Arguments

x

A character (or factor) vector.

also

Additional exact strings to treat as missing. Defaults to the na_answers option ("Prefer not to answer"; see ezrsurvey_options()). Set to character(0) to only blank out "".

trim

Whether to trim surrounding whitespace before comparing. Defaults to TRUE.

Value

A character vector the same length as x, with blanks and non-answers replaced by NA.

Details

The input is coerced to character (so factors are handled), optionally whitespace-trimmed, and any value equal to "" or to one of also becomes NA. The default also reads the na_answers option, so you can change what counts as a non-answer package-wide with ezrsurvey_options(na_answers = ...). Most of the calc_* helpers call na_blank() internally when na_rm = TRUE, so you usually get this clean-up for free; call it directly when you want to blank a column in a pipeline.

See also

ensure_numeric(), ezrsurvey_options().

Other recode: add_region(), bin_numeric(), clean_label(), drop_items(), ensure_numeric(), generation_scheme(), nps_group(), recode_age(), recode_generation(), recode_likert(), recode_region(), split_multi()

Examples

na_blank(c("Yes", "", "Prefer not to answer", "No"))
#> [1] "Yes" NA    NA    "No" 

# add your own non-answers
na_blank(c("a", "n/a", "N/A"), also = c("n/a", "N/A"))
#> [1] "a" NA  NA