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

Here's a variant that removes the extra ", " too. Does not require touppper either - but if you want that, just specify ignore.case=TRUE to gsub.

test <- c("Andreas Groll, M.D.", 
  "",
  "Pan-Chyr Yang, PHD",
  "Suh-Fang Jeng, Sc.D",
  "Peter S Sebel, MB BS, PhD Chantal Kerssens, PhD",
  "Lawrence Currie, MD")

gsub(",? *(MD|M\\.D\\.|P[hH]D)", "", test)
#[1] "Andreas Groll"                         ""                                     
#[3] "Pan-Chyr Yang"                         "Suh-Fang Jeng, Sc.D"                  
#[5] "Peter S Sebel, MB BS Chantal Kerssens" "Lawrence Currie"