Remove text inside brackets, parens, and/or braces

Question

I am in need of a function that extracts any type of bracket ie (), [], {} and the information in between. I created it and get it to do what I want but I get an annoying w

Answer 1

Give this a shot. I prefer the stringr package! :)

bracketXtract <- function(string, bracket = "all", include.bracket = TRUE){
  # Load stringr package
  require(stringr)

  # Regular expressions for your brackets
  rgx = list(square = "\\[\\w*\\]", curly  = "\\{\\w*\\}", round  = "\\(\\w*\\)")
  rgx['all'] = sprintf('(%s)|(%s)|(%s)', rgx$square, rgx$curly, rgx$round)

  # Ensure you have the correct bracket name
  stopifnot(bracket %in% names(rgx))

  # Find your matches
  matches = str_extract_all(string, pattern = rgx[[bracket]])[[1]]

  # Remove brackets from results if needed
  if(!include.bracket) 
    matches = sapply(matches, function(m) substr(m, 2, nchar(m)-1))

  unname(matches)
}



j <- "What kind of cheese isn't your cheese? {wonder} Nacho cheese! [groan] (Laugh)"  
bracketXtract(j)
# [1] "{wonder}" "[groan]"  "(Laugh)" 
bracketXtract(j, bracket = "square")
# [1] "[groan]"
bracketXtract(j, include.bracket = F)
# [1] "wonder" "groan"  "Laugh"