Error removing blank values in character strings

[mbcarlos96]

For variables with PII search strings in the variable name or label, blanks are removed from the variable so that only non-missing values are written to the output file:
data_no_blanks <- data[data[varname]!="",]

For date variables that are formatted as character strings (e.g. "2016-08-02"), this produces the following error:

Error in charToDate(x) : character string is not in a standard unambiguous format

[mbcarlos96]

Removal of blanks was removed from script.