r - How can I remove a single pair of parentheses with text in a character?

Question

I've got a character in R:

value <- "This is (delete) a (keep) test sentence."

I want to remove the first pair of parentheses with the text, but keep the second one. I tried to use a gsub():

value2 <- gsub("(delete)", " ", value)

The result is: "This is () a (keep) test sentence."

But what I need is: "This is a (keep) test sentence."

What can I do to reach this?

You can try this `str_replace(value, "\\(.*?\\){1}", "")` – Tho Vu Aug 11 '20 at 13:11 — Tho Vu, Aug 11 '20 at 13:11

Ronak Shah · Accepted Answer · 2020-08-11T13:16:39.983

1

Use sub :

sub('\\(.*?\\)\\s', '', value)
#[1] "This is a (keep) test sentence."

() are metacharacters and need to be escaped with \\.
.*? is to match as few characters possible till a closing bracket ()) is encountered.

edited Aug 11 '20 at 13:16

answered Aug 11 '20 at 13:11

Ronak Shah

How about adding `\\s` to the pattern to remove 1 space away? – Darren Tsai Aug 11 '20 at 13:15
Good suggestion. Updated the answer. – Ronak Shah Aug 11 '20 at 13:16

1 Answers1