How to delete some characters in r string

Question

I want to delete the character:" (mean (SD))", and I used 3 methods but none of them are successful. I don't know why.

 names <- c("Y_OR_N (mean (SD))", "age (mean (SD))", "101004A (mean (SD))", "101016 (mean (SD))", "209003 (mean (SD))", "210005 (mean (SD))", "GFR (mean (SD))", "307001 (mean (SD))", "308001 (mean (SD))", "308014 (mean (SD))")


 names %>% str_remove(pattern = " (mean (SD))")
 names %>% str_replace(pattern = " (mean (SD))", replacement = "")
 names %>% gsub(x = ., pattern = " (mean (SD))", replacement = "")

Any help will be highly appreciated!

It seems that you can achieve it by simply deleting everything after the space. Try `sub(' .*', '', x)` **NOTE** I changed `names` to `x` as `names` is a predefined function in R — Sotos, Feb 25 '20 at 15:38

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 25 '20 at 15:36

0

Parenthesis are special, try escaping them with the \\

names %>% str_remove_all(pattern = " \\(mean \\(SD\\)\\)")

answered Feb 25 '20 at 15:36

M.Viking

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score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 25 '20 at 15:40

You can try the code below, using gsub + trimws (optional), i.e.,

trimws(gsub("(mean (SD))","",names,fixed = TRUE))

such that

> trimws(gsub("(mean (SD))","",names,fixed = T))
 [1] "Y_OR_N"  "age"     "101004A" "101016"  "209003" 
 [6] "210005"  "GFR"     "307001"  "308001"  "308014"

How to delete some characters in r string

2 Answers2