Convert numbers written with thousands separator to numerical value in R

Question:

I have the following number that I'm importing from a site, I put it as follows so I don't need to put all the data import code

a <- as.character("353.636.000.000")

I would like to turn this into a number, but I'm not getting it

I tried to do as follows, separating the terms by . and then join again and transform into number, however, it didn't work

temp2 <- strsplit(temp2, ".")

I need it to result in an object a with a value of 353636000000

Answer:

With stringr you can do this:

library(tidyverse)

b <- a %>% 
  str_replace_all(pattern = '[.]', '') %>% 
  as.numeric()

class(b)
[1] "numeric"