How to search for multiple strings and replace them with nothing within a list of strings

Question

I have a column in a dataframe like this:

npt2$name
#  [1] \"Andreas Groll, M.D.\"
#  [2] \"\"
#  [3] \"Pan-Chyr Yang, PHD\"
#  [4] \"Suh-Fang Jeng, Sc.D\"
#  [5         


        

Answer 1

With a single ugly regex:

 gsub('[M,P].?D.?','',npt2$name)

Which says, find characters M or P followed by zero or one character of any kind, followed by a D and zero or one additional character. More explicitly, you could do this in three steps:

npt2$name <- gsub('MD','',npt2$name)
npt2$name <- gsub('M\\.D\\.','',npt2$name)
npt2$name <- gsub('PhD','',npt2name)

In those three, what's happening should be more straight forward. the second replacement you need to "escape" the period since its a special character.