keep only unique elements in string in r

Question

In genomics research, you often have many strings with duplicate gene names. I would like to find an efficient way to only keep the unique gene names in a string. This is an exa

Answer 1

Based on the example showed, perhaps

gsub("(\\w+);\\1", "\\1", genes)
#[1] "GSTP1;APC"

Answer 2

An alternative is doing

unique(unlist(strsplit(genes, ";")))
#[1] "GSTP1" "APC"

Then this should give you the answer

paste(unique(unlist(strsplit(genes, ";"))), collapse = ";")
#[1] "GSTP1;APC"