Removing colors automatically

If you did not want to bother specifying colors, and you wanted to remove colors automatically, you could accomplish that as well.

The colors() function

The colors() function returns a list of colors that are used in the current palette. We can then perform a little code manipulation in conjunction with the gsub() function that we just used to replace all of the specified colors from OnlineRetail$Description with blanks.

We will also use the kable() function, which is contained within the knitr package, in order to produce simple HTML tables of the results:

# compute the length of the field before changes
 before <- sum(nchar(OnlineRetail$Description))

 # get the unique colors returned from the colors function, and remove any digits found at the end of the string

 # get the unique colors
 col2 <- unique(gsub("[0-9]+", "", colors(TRUE)))


 #Now we will filter out any colors with a length > 7. This number is somewhat arbitrary but it is just done for illustration...