删除特定单词后的文本，R 中的某些字符除外

Question

First post: Let me know if I'm posting in the wrong place. I'm looking to remove text from a lot of data i R. Each line(string?) looks like this:

example_sentence <- "John Doe and Jane Doe (C)"

I would like to keep only the first name in every sentence and the parenthesis (including what's in it). Every parenthesis contains one or two letters (both in capital and lower case letters)

What I've tried:

example_sentence %>% str_remove("and.*")

This obviously removes the parenthesis. Just getting to know regexpr. Looking for something like:

[^(*)]

Can't get it to work. Any thoughts?

EDIT: Here's some more input as requested. Maybe it will help others! (och = and in Swedish)

[1] "Anders Ahlgren och Anders Åkesson (C)"           
[2] "Karin Nilsson (C)"                               
[3] "Edward Riedl (M)"                                
[4] "Per-Ingvar Johnsson och Anders Åkesson (C)"      
[5] "Per-Ingvar Johnsson och Annika Qarlsson (C)"     
[6] "Annika Qarlsson och Ulrika Carlsson i Skövde (C)"

Expected output:

[1] "Anders Ahlgren (C)"           
[2] "Karin Nilsson (C)"                               
[3] "Edward Riedl (M)"                                
[4] "Per-Ingvar Johnsson (C)"      
[5] "Per-Ingvar Johnsson (C)"     
[6] "Annika Qarlsson (C)"

Answer 1

The [^(*)] pattern matches any single character but ( , * and ) and str_remove removes all these characters from anywhere in the string.

If you plan to remove a word and and any chars other than ( and ) after it, you may use

 example_sentence %>% str_remove("\\band\\b[^()]*")

Or, using base R:

sub("\\band\\b[^()]*", "", example_sentence)

The pattern matches:

• \band\b - a whole word and ( \b is a word boundary)
• [^()]* - any char, 0 or more occurrences, other than ( and ) .

See the regex demo and an R demo . See also the regex graph :

Answer 2

Try this:

example_sentence <- "John Doe and Jane Doe (C)"

spliting <- function(x)
{
  y <- strsplit(x,split = ' ')
  z <- y[[1]]
  z <- z[c(1,length(z))]
  return(z)
}

spliting(example_sentence)

[1] "John" "(C)"

Answer 3

You might be able to do this with capture groups. As Ronak says, a few more example input/outputs would be helpful as I'm not sure we know 100% all the possible forms you have in your data.

Here is a start in any case:

gsub('and.*(\\([^)]*\\)).*', '\\1', example_sentence)
# [1] "John Doe (C)"