R: Regex for Phone Numbers

Question

I am working with the R programming language.

I have a column of data that looks something like this:

string = c("a1 123-456-7899 hh", "b 124-123-9999 b3")

I would like to remove the "phone numbers" so that the final result looks like this:

[1] "a1 hh" "b  b3"

gsub("^(\+\d{1,2}\s)?\(?\d{3}\)?[\s.-]\d{3}[\s.-]\d{4}$", "", string, fixed = TRUE)

But I get the following error: Error: '\+' is an unrecognized escape in character string starting ""^(\+"

Can someone please show me how to fix this?

Thanks!

@ ScottC: thank you for your reply! Could you please show me how I would apply this? — stats_noob, Nov 24 '22 at 00:55
Actually - I think `[\+]` might be the way to go instead of `\+` — ScottC, Nov 24 '22 at 00:56
You need to escape slashes in R strings with an additional slash. A single slash is an escape character. If you need a literal slash you need a double slash in the string — MrFlick, Nov 24 '22 at 01:01
Could this code be applied over a column? e.g. file$col = sub(" ([[:digit:]-]+)", "", file$col)? — stats_noob, Nov 24 '22 at 03:11

ScottC · Answer 1 · 2022-11-24T01:56:12.230

2

Try:

library(stringr)

s <- c("a1 123-456-7899 hh", "b 124-123-9999 b3")
result <- str_replace(s, "\\d+[-]\\d+[-]\\d+\\s", "")
print(result)

OUTPUT:

[1] "a1 hh" "b b3"

This will look for :

And replace it with "" - nothing

edited Nov 24 '22 at 01:56

answered Nov 24 '22 at 00:56

ScottC

I just did ... still not working on my side ... will keep trying to debug! thank you so much for all your help! – stats_noob Nov 24 '22 at 01:14
Ok - no worries - this may help : https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/stringr/vignettes/regular-expressions.html – ScottC Nov 24 '22 at 01:17
thank you... i wonder why this is not working? – stats_noob Nov 24 '22 at 01:26

1 Answers1