gsub with “|” character in R

Question

I have a data frame with strings under a variable with the | character. What I want is to remove anything downstream of the | character.

For ex

Answer 1

You have to scape | by adding \\|. Try this

> gsub("\\|.*$", "", string)
[1] "heat-shock protein hsp70, putative "

where string is

string <- "heat-shock protein hsp70, putative | location=Ld28_v01s1:1091329-1093293(-) | length=654 | sequence_SO=chromosome | SO=protein_coding"

This alternative remove the space at the end of line in the output

 gsub("\\s+\\|.*$", "", string)
[1] "heat-shock protein hsp70, putative"