Question: I'm doing a massive cleanup on an old system and I have a SQL Server database table with a `TEXT`-type column where numeric (including money) data was stored (as well as text data too), often in a localized format or typo'd horribly. I need to standardize the data to American numeric standards. 

Examples of some of the data:

```
$1,000 - Good!
$1.000 - Bad, should have been $1,000
$1,000.000 - Bad, should have been $1,000,000
$1,000.000.00 - Bad, should have been $1,000,000.00
$1.000.000,00 - Bad, should have been $1,000,000.00
$10,.000 - Bad, should have been $10,000
500.000 - Bad, should have been 500,000
1.325% - Good!

```

I gave some examples because I wanted to illustrate some of the difficulties in finding and correcting the issues. I'm going under the premise that a period followed by 3 digits should have been a comma (unless it was perhaps a precise % and not a $), but a period followed by 2 digits was correct. Anyone have any suggests for cleaning this up in SQL or an outside-the-box solution that may be better?

Answer: 
```
xx[1, (colnames(xx)):= list(1,2)]

```
Your question reads like somebody complaining that it's difficult to hook a trailer to a Lamborghini. Your car dealer will tell you to buy a truck instead of a race car.

If replacing a row by an atomic vector seems like a regular task to you a matrix would appear to be the appropriate data structure for you.

If you want to use data.table you should just reshape your data to long format and then use the reference semantics together with subsetting:

```
longDT[observationNo == 1, values := replacementVector]

```