I have nearly 100,000 rows of scraped data that I have converted to data frames. One column is a string of text characters but is operating strangely. In the example below, there is text, that has bracketed information that I want to remove, and I also want to remove " (c)". However the space in front is not technically a space (is it considered whitespace?).
I am not sure how to reproduce the example here because when I copy/paste a record, it is treated like normal and works, but in the scraped data, it does not. Gut check was to count spaces and it gave me 4, which means the space in front of ( is not a true space. I do not know how to remove this!
My code that I usually would run is as follows. Again, works this way, but does not work in my scraped data.
test<-c("Barry Windham (c) & Mike Rotundo (c)")
test<-gsub("[ ][(]c[)]","",test)
You can consider using:
test<-c("Barry Windham (c) & Mike Rotundo (c)")
gsub("(*UCP)\\s+\\(c\\)", "", test, perl=TRUE)
# => [1] "Barry Windham & Mike Rotundo"
See an online R demo
Details
(*UCP) - makes all shorthand character classes in the PCRE regex (it is PCRE due to perl=TRUE) Unicode aware\\s+ - any one or more Unicode whitespaces\\(c\\) - (c) substring.If you need to keep (c), capture it and use a backreference in the replacement:
gsub("(*UCP)\\s+(\\(c\\))", "\\1", test, perl=TRUE)