Remove any text inside square brackets in r

Question

I would like to remove all the words inside square brackets as well as the brackets themselves. For example,

text = c('[Verse 1]', '[Verse 1: Dua Lipa]', '[Corus]', '[Corus: Ann Marie & Ed Sheeran]')

Like above, the length of words inside the bracket are not constant. So I need a function that can identify the position of [ and ] in order to erase all the words, numbers and symbols in between. Is there any function able to do that?

What tool are you using and what have you tried already? – Corion Oct 06 '18 at 09:04 — Corion, Oct 06 '18 at 09:04

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 06 '18 at 09:12

4

You may remove all substrings within square brackets using

gsub("\\[[^][]*]", "", text)

The pattern matches an open square bracket, then any zero or more chars other than square brackets, and then a close square bracket.

answered Oct 06 '18 at 09:12

Wiktor Stribiżew

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OMG, Thanks a lot Wiktor!! It's so simple and clean. Great :D – Jean Oct 06 '18 at 09:21
Then How could I apply this to the case of `<, >` instead of `[, ]`? I'm really bad at regular expressions. – Jean Oct 06 '18 at 09:55
@Jean `gsub("<[^<>]*>", "", text)`. What were you trying? – Wiktor Stribiżew Oct 06 '18 at 10:53
Thanks! Now I think I got the intuition. I'm doing text mining with song lyrics. There are some parts unnecessary so that's the reason. – Jean Oct 06 '18 at 13:03
Yeah I did. Thanks again! – Jean Oct 06 '18 at 13:26

Remove any text inside square brackets in r

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