Remove all characters except
The :space: portion of the regex makes no sense, and probably does not do what you intend.

&gt; x &lt;- "abc:def."
&gt; gsub("[^a-zA-Z0-9,-:space:]", " ", x, perl = TRUE)
[1] "abc:def."


Notice that the colon and period are still present after the substitution.

In fact, inside the character class, ,-: means "all characters with ASCII codes from 44 (the comma) up to 58 (the colon)".

A literal hyphen must be the first or the last character in a character class; otherwise, it is treated as a range (like A-Z).

If you want a character class for whitespace, use "\\s" or [:space:].

So, if you wanted to convert all consecutive strings of junk to a single space, preserving only letters, digits, commas, slashes, hyphens, and whitespace, you could write:

gsub("[^-,/a-zA-Z0-9[:space:]]+", " ", x, perl = TRUE)


or

gsub("[^-,/a-zA-Z0-9\\s]+", " ", x, perl = TRUE)