Remove parentheses and text within from strings in R

Question

In R, I have a list of companies such as:

companies  <-  data.frame(Name=c("Company A Inc (COMPA)","Company B (BEELINE)", "Company C Inc. (Coco)", "Company D Inc.", "Company E")) 

I want to remove the text with parenthesis, ending up with the following list:

                  Name 1        Company A Inc  2            Company B 3       Company C Inc. 4       Company D Inc. 5            Company E 

One approach I tried was to split the string and then use ldply:

companies$Name <- as.character(companies$Name) c<-strsplit(companies$Name, "\\(") ldply(c) 

But because not all company names have parentheses portions, it fails:

Error in list_to_dataframe(res, attr(.data, "split_labels"), .id, id_as_factor) :    Results do not have equal lengths 

I'm not married to the strsplit solution. Whatever removes that text and the parentheses would be fine.

Answer 1

A gsub should work here

gsub("\\s*\\([^\\)]+\\)","",as.character(companies$Name))  # [1] "Company A Inc"  "Company B"      "Company C Inc." # [4] "Company D Inc." "Company E"  

Here we just replace occurrences of "(...)" with nothing (also removing any leading space). R makes it look worse than it is with all the escaping we have to do for the parenthesis since they are special characters in regular expressions.