Regex for removing data in parenthesis

Question

I'm trying to remove the parenthesis areas of these strings below, but I can't get a regex working :(

Data:

x (LOC)
ds ds (32C)
d'ds ds (LeC)
ds-d da(LOQ)
12345 (deC)

Regex tried:

[ \(\w+\)]

Regex101:

http://regex101.com/r/bD8fE2

Example code

items = ["x (LOC)", "ds ds (32C)", "d'ds ds (LeC)", "ds-d da(LOQ)", "12345 (deC)"]
for item in items:
    item = re.sub(r"[ \(\w+\)]", "", item)
    print item

Answer 1

Remove the square brackets; you are not matching a character class:

item = re.sub(r" \(\w+\)", "", item)

Demo:

>>> items = ["x (LOC)", "ds ds (32C)", "d'ds ds (LeC)", "ds-d da(LOQ)", "12345 (deC)"]
>>> for item in items:
...     print re.sub(r" \(\w+\)", "", item)
... 
x
ds ds
d'ds ds
ds-d da(LOQ)
12345

The one-but last example has no space preceding the opening parenthesis (() and thus doesn't match. You could make the space optional if you need that pattern to work too:

item = re.sub(r" ?\(\w+\)", "", item)

Perhaps matching anything that isn't a closing parenthesis would work for you as well:

item = re.sub(r" ?\([^)]+\)", "", item)

This matches a wider range of characters than just \w.

In a regular expression, square brackets, [...], denote a character class; a set of characters to match once. The class [ \(w+\)] means: match one character, if it matches the set including a space, an opening parenthesis, all characters of the \w class, a + plus, or a closing parenthesis.

Answer 2

Anything within square brackets are taken irrespective of the order in which you have the characters because [ ... ] is a character class. remove them entirely:

r" \(\w+\)"

And I would add a ? for an optional space:

r" ?\(\w+\)"

regex101 demo