title: remove (non-breaking) space character in string
body: <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5992082/how-to-remove-all-whitespace-from-a-string">This question</a> seems to make it easy to remove space characters in a string in R. However when I load the following table I'm not able to remove a space between two numbers (eg.<code>11 846.4</code>):</p>
  <pre class="lang-r prettyprint-override"><code>require(XML)
  require(RCurl)
  require(data.table)
  
  link2fetch = 'https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Landwirtschaft-Forstwirtschaft-Fischerei/Feldfruechte-Gruenland/Tabellen/ackerland-hauptnutzungsarten-kulturarten.html'
  
  theurl = getURL(link2fetch, .opts = list(ssl.verifypeer = FALSE) ) # important!
  area_cult10 = readHTMLTable(theurl, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
  area_cult10 = rbindlist(area_cult10)
      
  test = sub(',', '.', area_cult10$V5) # change , to . 
  test = gsub('(.+)\\s([A-Z]{1})*', '\\1', test) # remove LETTERS
  gsub('\\s', '', test[1]) # remove white space?
  </code></pre>
  <p>Why can't I remove the space in <code>test[1]</code>?
  Thanks for any advice! Can this be something else than a space character? Maybe the answer is really easy and I'm overlooking something.</p>