regex - Remove square brackets from a string vector

Question

I have a character vector in which each element is enclosed in brackets. I want to remove the brackets and just have the string.

So I tried:

n = c("[Dave]", "[Tony]", "[Sara]")

paste("", n, "", sep="")

Unfortunately, this doesn't work for some reason.

I've performed the same task before using this same code, and am not sure why it's not working this time.

I want to go from '[Dave]' to 'Dave'.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You could gsub out the brackets like so:

n = c("[Dave]", "[Tony]", "[Sara]")

gsub("\[|\]", "", n)
[1] "Dave" "Tony" "Sara"