Regex pattern removal in R

Question

I have a vector with a list of lists for each observation:

"Alcohol Dependence (F10.20),Hep B (Z22.51),Hep C (Z22.52),Opioid Abuse (F11.19),Pain- Back, low (M54.5),Pain- Back, upper (M54.9),Respiratory- Tuberculosis (TB) (A15.9)"

I am trying to remove the parentheses and everything in between, but I can't figure out the regex expression to use here. I am using the stringr package, and str_replace_all function. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Do you want an output like this: `"Alcohol Dependence,Hep B,Hep C,Opioid Abuse,Pain- Back, low,Pain- Back, upper,Respiratory- Tuberculosis"`? — Sweeper, Jun 09 '18 at 17:01

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 09 '18 at 17:08

This does exactly what is requested - it removes the parentheses and everything in between

str_replace_all(text_line, "\\([^\\)]*\\)", "")

You might also wish to remove the space(s) before the parantheses start:

str_replace_all(text_line, " *\\([^\\)]*\\)", "")

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 09 '18 at 17:09

0

You can use this regular expression:

\s*\(.*?\)\s*

And replace with an empty string "".

str_replace_all(your_string, "\\s*\\(.*?\\)\\s*", "")

Demo

Explanation:

The middle part \(.*?\) uses a lazy quantifier (*?) so it will stop as soon as a ) is matched. The \\s* at the start and end matches the spaces so you don't get extra spaces in the result.

answered Jun 09 '18 at 17:09

Sweeper

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Thanks for this, and the explanation... this is amazingly helpful! – paramagical Jun 09 '18 at 17:23

Regex pattern removal in R

2 Answers2

Demo