Remove a pattern from a character

Question

I have a character like this: x = "abc [File: abcbdosln}} \n abc \n"

And I want to remove File: abcbdosln}} \n from x so that the result would be "abc [ abc \n".

I tried the gsub function but have not yet obtained the correct result.

gsub("[File].*[\n]", "", x) # this one would remove all the content of x
gsub("File.*\n", "", x, fixed = TRUE) # this one does not work

I am trying to solve this problem in a general sense, that is, how to remove this pattern through regular expression.

Answer 1

gsub with fixed = TRUE flag means that you want a literal string evaluation, not a regular expression.

Remove the flag, use non-greedy match and it will work.

Input:

x <- "abc [File: abcbdosln}} \n abc \n"
gsub("File.+?\\n", "", x)

Output:

"abc [ abc \n"