Removing parentheses and everything in them with Regex

Question

Having a bit of trouble with some code I'm working through. Basically, I have transcripts (txt files) for a few Japanese anime, of which I want to remove everything but the spoken lines (Japanese sentences) in order to do some NLP experiments.

I've managed to accomplish a good bit of cleaning, but where I'm stuck is with parentheses. A majority of the elements in my list start with a character's name inside parentheses (ie (Armin)). I want to remove these, but all the regex code I've found online doesn't seem to work.

Here's a snippet of the list I'm working with:

['（アルミン）その日', '人類は思い出した', '（アルミン）奴らに', '支配されていた恐怖を', '（アルミン）鳥籠の中に', 'とらわれていた―', '屈辱を', '（キース）総員', '戦闘用意！', '目標は１体だ', '必ず仕留め―', 'ここを', '我々', '人類', '最初の壁外拠点とする！', '（エルヴィン）あっ…', '目標接近！', '（キース）訓練どおり５つに分かれろ！', '囮は我々が引き受ける！', '全攻撃班', '立体機動に移れ！', '（エルヴィン）全方向から', '同時に叩くぞ！', '（モーゼス）やあーっ！']

I've tried the following code (it's as close as I could get):

no_parentheses = []

for line in mylist:

    if '(' in line:
        line = re.sub('\(.*\)','', line)
        no_parentheses.append(line)

    else:
        no_parentheses.append(line)

But when I view the results, those pesky parentheses remain in my list mockingly .

Could anyone offer suggestions to resolve this issue?

Thanks again!

Answer 1

The brackets used in the text are full-width brackets. Specifically, U+FF08 FULLWIDTH LEFT PARENTHESIS, and U+FF09 FULLWIDTH RIGHT PARENTHESIS.

Your regex should use full-width brackets as well.

line = re.sub('（.*）','', line)