Removing Asterisk and Brackets from a column

[ksingh19]

Hi All,

I need help with removal of asterisk and brackets from my dataset.

My dataset which includes * at the end of few values in a particular column such as ABC Imports* . It also includes some values within brackets like Imports (ABC).

I am trying to remove only * and only brackets in these values. I tried str_replace, str_remove and even gsub, however, it doesn't work .

Example of str_replace
df <- df %>%
str_replace(Column_name, "Imports*", "Imports")

It throws me error saying "unused argument ("Imports")

Can you please help? Thank you!

Regards,
Kamlesh Singh

[FJCC]

Both asterisks and parentheses are special characters in regular expressions and need to be escaped with backslashes. Here is a simple example of what I think you want to do. The pipe, |, in the regular expression means "or".

library(stringr)
library(dplyr)

DF <- data.frame(COL1 = c("XYZ ABC", "Imports*", "XYZ (ABC) Imports"))
DF
#>                COL1
#> 1           XYZ ABC
#> 2          Imports*
#> 3 XYZ (ABC) Imports
DF <- DF %>% mutate(COL1 = str_replace_all(COL1, "\\*|\\(|\\)", ""))
DF
#>              COL1
#> 1         XYZ ABC
#> 2         Imports
#> 3 XYZ ABC Imports

^{Created on 2020-06-08 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)}

[Leon]

Hi @ksingh19,

Take a look at this:

library("tidyverse")
d <- tibble(my_text = c("ABC Imports*", "Imports (ABC)"))
d %>% 
  mutate(my_text_clean = str_replace_all(string = my_text,
                                         pattern = "[\\*\\(\\)]",
                                         replacement = ""))

Hope it helps

[ksingh19]

Thank you so much!
So backslash is the trick!

[ksingh19]

Thanks Leon! Yes, it works! Backslash is new to me in str_replace!
Thanks a bunch!

[Leon]

Kindly remember to mark the solution

...and the backslashes are there for a reason - I recommend, that you read this chapter in R for Data Science