Delete exclude specific strings

Question

I would like to exclude string ""and "<"

year  name
1   <b>abc<
2   <b>judy<
3   <b>lin<

I would like the output to look like this:

year  name
1   abc
2   judy
3   lin

Answer 1

You can str_extract the part you're interested in:

library(stringr)
df$name <- str_extract(df$name, "(?<=<b>)[^<>]+(?=<)")

How this works:

• (?<=<b>): if you see <b> on the left (positive lookbehind) ...
• [^<>]+: ... match any chars one or more times that are not < or > provided ...
• (?=<): ... you also see < on the right (positive lookahead)

Answer 2

We can use sub here:

df$name <- sub("^<b>(.*)<$", "\\1", df$name)