How to replace NA with 0 using starts with

Question

I am trying to replace NA values with 0 for a specific set of columns in my tibble. All the columns start with the same prefix. So, I want to know if there is a concise way to make use of the starts_with() function from the dplyr package that would allow me to do this.

I have tried replace_na() function from the tidyr package to no avail. Below is the code.

library(tidyverse)

tibble1 <- tibble(
 id = c(10, 20, 30),
 col_a = c(1, NA, 4),
 col_b = c(NA, 99, 100),
 col_c = c("d", "e", NA)
)
replace_na(tbl1, list(starts_with("num_") = 0)))

Answer 1

Well I could suggest various options such as mutate_at with if_else(or case_when). This works when you want to replace all the NA values in the columns with 0.

mutate_at(tibble1, vars( starts_with("col_") ), 
          funs( if_else( is.na(.), 0, .) ) )

# A tibble: 3 x 4
     id col_a col_b col_c
  <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <chr>
1     10     1     0     d
2     20     0    99     e
3     30     4   100    <NA>

Note: starts_with and other select helpers return an integer vector giving the position of the matched variables.