How to replace strings containing 'greater than' and 'less than' - regex

Question

I am trying to replace strings containing > and < with R
datanames<-names(data)
datanames
## [1] BbMx>2.5 BbAv>2.5 BbMx<2.5 BbAv<2.5
datanames<-gsub("[>]","gt",datanames)
datanames<-gsub("[<]","lt",datanames)
datanames<-gsub("[.]","",datanames)
datanames
## [1] BbMx25 BbAv25 BbMx251 BbAv251
What I am doing wrong?
UPDATE: For some strange reason R doesn't read the same character of the csv. Namely in my csv I read with libreoffice
"BbMx>2.5" "BbAv>2.5" "BbMx<2.5" "BbAv<2.5"
but once R read csv turn this strings in
"BbMx.2.5" "BbAv.2.5" "BbMx.2.5.1" "BbAv.2.5.1"

Answer 1

If you just do
x <- c("BbMx>2.5","BbAv>2.5","BbMx<2.5","BbAv<2.5")
x <- gsub("[>]","gt",x)
x <- gsub("[<]","lt",x)
x <- gsub("[.]","",x)
You should get
"BbMxgt25" "BbAvgt25" "BbMxlt25" "BbAvlt25"
as expected. The problem is that the input from names(data) isn't what you think it is.
R has rules about valid column names in data.frames. R will run make.names on those values to attempt to make uniuqe, valid names. This involved replacing non-alphanumeric values with periods and adding suffixes to ensure uniqueness.
To disable the auto-renaming, you can set check.names=F with the read.table/read.csv function and do the renaming yourself.
So if you have
x<-c("BbMx>2.5", "BbAv>2.5", "BbMx<2.5","BbAv<2.5" )
Then
make.names(x, unique=T)
# [1] "BbMx.2.5" "BbAv.2.5" "BbMx.2.5.1" "BbAv.2.5.1"
So ultimately this had nothing to do with gsub. This was really about how R transforms raw data into data.frames.

Answer 2

I know #MrFlick has provided an answer already, but just to comment on the way you are implementing your characters and calls using gsub, the < and > characters are not considered a character of special meaning so you do not need to place them inside a character class [ ], you can use them as a literal.
And you can cascade your gsub functions together here.
datanames <- gsub('>', 'gt', gsub('<', 'lt', gsub('\\.', '', datanames)))