How to treat operators like characters in R [duplicate]

Question

I often have input dataframes where data in some columns are delimited by a "||". I would like to be able to remove all the data after the "||", but since "||" is an operator weird things happen when I treat it like a normal string, e.g.:

gsub("||.*", "", df$col) and str_replace(df$col, "||", "") do not do what I expect them to do.

Is there a simple way to force R to read operators as if they were any other character?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Any of these statements should work:

sub("[|][|].*", "", x)
sub("[|]{2}.*", "", x)
sub("\\|\\|.*", "", x)
sub("\\|{2}.*", "", x)

The problem is not that || is an operator in R. It is that | is a metacharacter in regular expressions. You can get around the special interpretation of metacharacters by placing them inside of character classes delimited by [] or escaping them with a backslash (and escaping that backslash with a second backslash). See ?regex for details.