Remove square brackets from a string vector

Question

I have a character vector in which each element is enclosed in brackets. I want to remove the brackets and just have the string.

So I tried:

n = c(\"         


        

Answer 1

A regular expression substitution will do it. Look at the gsub() function.

This gives you what you want (it removes any instance of '[' or ']'):

gsub("\\[|\\]", "", n)

Answer 2

You could gsub out the brackets like so:

n = c("[Dave]", "[Tony]", "[Sara]")

gsub("\\[|\\]", "", n)
[1] "Dave" "Tony" "Sara"

Answer 3

The other answers should be enough to get your desired output. I just wanted to provide a brief explanation of why what you tried didn't work.

paste concatenates character strings. If you paste an empty character string, "", to something with a separator that is also an empty character string, you really haven't altered anything. So paste can't make a character string shorter; the result will either be the same (as in your example) or longer.

Answer 4

If working within tidyverse:

library(tidyverse); library(stringr)

n = c("[Dave]", "[Tony]", "[Sara]")

n %>% str_replace_all("\\[|\\]", "")
[1] "Dave" "Tony" "Sara"