Ha! Much better than mine and without PERL, to boot. Bravo Gabor! -- Bert
Bert Gunter Genentech Nonclinical Biostatisics -----Original Message----- From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On Behalf Of Gabor Grothendieck Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2009 2:03 PM To: Judith Flores Cc: RHelp Subject: Re: [R] Regular expression to define contents between parentheses Instead of using .* use [^)]* so that you only get up to the next ) and also it seems that you want to trim spaces so add space star at the beginning and end: gsub(" *\\([^)]*\\) *", "", myvector) On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 4:17 PM, Judith Flores<jur...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Hello dear R-helpers, > > I haven't been able to figure out of find a solution in the R-help archives about how to delete all the characters contained in groups of parenthesis. I have a vector that looks more or less like this: > > myvector<-c("something (80 km/h, sd) & more (6 kg/L,sd)", "somethingelse (48 m/s, sd) & moretoo (50g/L , sd)") > > I want to extract all the strings that are not contained in parenthesis, the goal would be to obtain the following new vector: > > subvector<-c("something & more", "somethingelse & moretoo") > > I tried the following, but this pattern seems to enclose all that is included between the first opened parenthesis and the last closed parethesis, which makes sense, but it's not what I need: > > subvector<-gsub("\\((.*)\\)","",myvector > > > Your help will be very appreciated. > > Thank you, > > Judith > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.