Remove trailing brackets in a string

Question

I'm trying to trim trailing square brackets, inner quotes and slashes in a list of R strings, preferably using dplyr.

Sample data:

df <- c("['Mamie Smith']", "[\"Screamin' Jay Hawkins\"]")

Expected result:

"Mamie Smith", "Screamin' Jay Hawkins"

What I have tried:

gsub("[[]]", "", df) # Throws error

df %>%
  str_replace("[[]]", "") # Also throws error

Answer 1

In base R we can make use of trimws function:

if we are not interested in the non word parts:

trimws(df, whitespace = "\\W+")
[1] "Mamie Smith"           "Screamin' Jay Hawkins"

But if we are only interested in deleting squarebrackets and quotes while leaving other punctuatons, spaces etc then:

trimws(df, whitespace = "[\\]\\[\"']+")
[1] "Mamie Smith"           "Screamin' Jay Hawkins"