title: How do I strip dollar signs ($) from data/ escape special characters in R?
body: <p>I've been using <code>gsub("toreplace","replacement", myvector)</code> to clean out data in R. While this works for commas and the like, removing <code>"$"</code> has no effect. So if I do <code>gsub("$","",myvector)</code> all the dollar signs remain in place.</p>
  
  <p>I think this is because <code>$</code> is a special character in R. I tried escaping it <code>"\$"</code> but that yields the same result (no effect). And I couldn't find a resource on escaping special characters in R.</p>
  
  <p>Obviously I should do this in preprocessing. But I was wondering if anyone out there knew how to either a) escape special characters in R b) get rid of pesky <code>$</code> in R directly. For science.</p>