Removing part of string before a sub-string and its first occurrence

I have a text output like:

str <- '=== AAAA === B§BBB === remove === remove1 === remove2 === AAAA === AAAA'


I would like to remove all the substring between the ===remove (included) and its first next ocurrency:

str_2 <- '=== AAAA === B§BBB === AAAA === AAAA'


I tried in gsub():

gsub()

gsub("=== B§BBB*.*=== AAAA","",str))


But it doesn't work.

Any help is appreciated.

2 Answers
2

Answer to the updated question

str <- '=== AAAA === B§BBB === remove === remove1 === remove2 === AAAA === AAAA'
sub("(?:\s*===\s*remove\S*)+","",str)


See the R demo online and an online regex demo.

The pattern matches 1+ consecutive occurrences of

\s*

===

\s*

remove

\S*

Answer to the original question

You may use

sub("=== remove.*?(n\s*?=== AAAA)","\1",str)


Details

=== remove

.*?

(n\s*?=== AAAA)

1

s*?

=== AAAA

An alternative PCRE regex can also be used:

sub("(?m)(?:(?:^|\R)\h*===\h*remove)+","",str, perl=TRUE)


Details

(?m)

^

(?:(?:^|\R)\h*===\h*remove)+

(?:^|\R)

\h*===\h*

===

remove

You could use the stringi package.

stringi

library(stringi)
stri_replace_all_fixed(str, " === remove", "")

[1] "=== AAAA === B§BBB === AAAA === AAAA"


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