How to remove square brackets, etc. from address strings?
Hi Sabina, You've run into two characteristics of regular expressions: [ ] are special characters * is a greedy match Reading an intro regular expression document will help with both of those. Meanwhile:
x <- "[Swidsinski, Alexander; Loening-Baucke, Vera; Lochs, Herbert] Charite Humboldt Univ, Innere Klin, D-10098 Berlin, Germany; [Hale, Laura P.] Duke Univ, Med Ctr, Dept Pathol, Durham, NC 27710 USA" x
[1] "[Swidsinski, Alexander; Loening-Baucke, Vera; Lochs, Herbert] Charite Humboldt Univ, Innere Klin, D-10098 Berlin, Germany; [Hale, Laura P.] Duke Univ, Med Ctr, Dept Pathol, Durham, NC 27710 USA"
gsub("\\[.*?\\] ", "", x) # escape [ and ] and make * lazy instead of greedy
[1] "Charite Humboldt Univ, Innere Klin, D-10098 Berlin, Germany; Duke Univ, Med Ctr, Dept Pathol, Durham, NC 27710 USA" Sarah
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 6:08 AM, Sabina Arndt <sabina.arndt at hotmail.de> wrote:
Hello,
I'd like to remove the individual pairs of square brackets along with
their content - plus the space directly behind it - from address strings
?such as this:
?[Swidsinski, Alexander; Loening-Baucke, Vera; Lochs, Herbert] Charite
Humboldt Univ, Innere Klin, D-10098 Berlin, Germany; [Hale, Laura P.]
Duke Univ, Med Ctr, Dept Pathol, Durham, NC 27710 USA
?I'd like get the following result:
?Charite Humboldt Univ, Innere Klin, D-10098 Berlin, Germany; Duke Univ, Med Ctr, Dept Pathol, Durham, NC 27710 USA
I tried
?address = gsub("(.*)[(.*)]", "\\2", address)
But this deletes everything from the first opening bracket to the last closing bracket and leaves only the very last address:
?Duke Univ, Med Ctr, Dept Pathol, Durham, NC 27710 USA
How can I remove only the individual pairs of square brackets along with their content?
Thank you very much in advance!
? ? ? ?[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
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