Remove all words in string containing punctuation (R)

Question

How (in R) would I remove any word in a string containing punctuation, keeping words without?

  test.string <- "I am:% a test+ to& see if-* your# fun/ction works o\r not"

  desired <- "I a see works not"

Answer 1

Here is an approach using sub which seems to work:

test.string <- "I am:% a test$ to& see if* your# fun/ction works o\r not"
gsub("[A-Za-z]*[^A-Za-z ]\\S*\\s*", "", test.string)

[1] "I a see works not"

This approach is to use the following regex pattern:

[A-Za-z]*     match a leading letter zero or more times
[^A-Za-z ]    then match a symbol once (not a space character or a letter)
\\S*          followed by any other non whitespace character
\\s*          followed by any amount of whitespace

Then, we just replace with empty string, to remove the words having one or more symbols in them.