I have a 2 column data frame (DF) of which one column contains vectors and the other is characters.

```
Orig.                    Matched
AbcD  c("ab.d","Acbd","AA.D","")
jKdf  c("JJf.","K.dF","JkD.","")

```

My aim is to strip all the punctuation marks (commas and periods) as well make everything lowercase. This is easy enough for the character column, but the vector column is more challenging.

Some lower case methods I tried using are 

* `lapply(DF, tolower)`. This causes the data frame to convert to a matrix. In doing so I lose the column of vectors structure.

In regards to the punctuation, I tried

* `gsub("\\.", "", DF)` and
* `gsub("\\,", "", DF)` to remove the periods and commas respectively.

This causes the data frame to convert to a character list. 

I guess my questions are as follows:

* Is there another way to remove punctuation and convert to lowercase that preserves the data frame structure?
* If not, how may i be able to convert the above outputs back into the original format; that being of a column of vectors?