I have a dataframe:

mydf <- data.frame(
  col1 = c("54", "abc", "123", "54 abc", "zzz", "a", "99"),
  col2 = c("100", "200", "300", "400", "500", "600", "700"),
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE
)

In this dataframe, I want to replace all elements with NA unless they meet one of these conditions:

• strictly a number (e.g. “54” keep, “54 abc” discard)
• belong to target_string

I was not sure how to do this in R using apply, so I tried to write a loop:

target_string <- c("a", "zzz")

replace_with_na_old <- function(df, target_string) {
  for (i in 1:nrow(df)) {
    for (j in 1:ncol(df)) {
      value <- df[i, j]
      if (!grepl("^[0-9]+$", value) && !(value %in% target_string)) {
        df[i, j] <- NA
      }
    }
  }
  return(df)
}

mydf_cleaned_old <- replace_with_na_old(mydf, target_string)

Is there another way to do this?