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Replace non-ascii chars with a defined string list without a loop in R

Submitted by Álvaro on May 22, 2012

I want to replace non-ascii characters (for now, only spanish), by their ascii equivalent. If I have "á", I want to replace it with "a" and so on.

I built this function (works fine), but I don't want to use a loop (including internal loops like sapply).

latin2ascii<-function(x) {
if(!is.character(x)) stop ("input must be a character object")
require(stringr)
mapL<-c("á","é","í","ó","ú","Á","É","Í","Ó","Ú","ñ","Ñ","ü","Ü")
mapA<-c("a","e","i","o","u","A","E","I","O","U","n","N","u","U")
for(y in 1:length(mapL)) {
  x<-str_replace_all(x,mapL[y],mapA[y])
  }
x
}

Is there an elegante way to solve it? Any help, suggestion or modification is appreciated