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Answer 1

+7 A:

You can do this with regular expressions. The regular expression you need is:

"\s?\S+[()]\S+\s?"

This removes any word containing either ( or ) or both, and removes both the word and collapses the surrounding whitespace. The match should be replaced with a single space.

In C# the regular expression could be used like this:

    string s = "car wheels_(four) klaxon";
    s = Regex.Replace(s, @"\s?\S*[()]\S*\s?", " ");

I'm not entirely sure of the VB translation for this, but hopefully you can figure it out.

Mark Byers 2009-11-27 19:01:54

your regex just blew my mind

JohnIdol 2009-11-27 19:04:03

A potential gotcha: this will match any word with a parenthesis even if the parenthesis is not balanced. That may or may not be desired.

Welbog 2009-11-27 19:06:19

Thanks Mark, it works fine but if it has a word like "(wheel)" doesn't replace the word :P

Sein Kraft 2009-11-27 19:06:28

Welbog: yes, you are right. This can be fixed easily for a single level of parentheses but if there can be nested parentheses, regex should not be used. To simplify it, I assumed the poster wishes to remove all words containing any number of parentheses, matching or not.

Mark Byers 2009-11-27 19:06:44

I thought of something like `\w*\(\w*\)\w*` (with somewhat proper parentheses), but yours it nicer. Nice trick with the spaces. +1.

Kobi 2009-11-27 19:07:37

@Mark: Sorry about the out-of-order comments. I wanted to make what I was saying clearer so I deleted the old one and replaced it. You're absolutely right about not using regex when there is possible nesting. I just wanted to make sure it's clear what the limits of your expression are.

Welbog 2009-11-27 19:07:39

Sein Kraft: I have updated the regex, but I'm not sure exactly what you want. Now it will remove a lone '(' too. Is this right? Or should there be at least one alphabetical character in the word?

Mark Byers 2009-11-27 19:08:50

I want to remove the word wich contains parenthesis. This could be in the middle of the word, in the end or in the begin. I mean, if it has a parenthesis just remove it. (sorry my english is very basic)

Sein Kraft 2009-11-27 19:11:48

Some more issues with this is that it will also delete punctuation connected to the word so, 'Hello (dear). World!" will change to "Hello World!", but "Hello. World!" might be desired. Do you need to handle this case too?

Mark Byers 2009-11-27 19:12:34

It works perfect! Thanks so much!

Sein Kraft 2009-11-27 19:13:12

No, because the string is a serie of random words so they dont have dots or anithing else.

Sein Kraft 2009-11-27 19:14:11

Answer 2

+1 A:

Slightly different:

sed "s/\s\+\S*(.\+)\S*\s\+/ /g" yourfile

It works like this:

yourfile:

car wheels_(four) klaxon
ciao (wheel) hey
foo bar (baz) qux
stack overflow_(rulez)_the world

transformed in:

car klaxon
ciao hey
foo bar qux
stack world

Thrawn 2009-11-27 19:10:54

Whoah. Regexs once more rule the world. http://xkcd.com/208/

Tonio 2009-11-27 19:22:23

Doesn't quite work. On 'foo bar (baz) qux' you get "foo qux" instead of "foo bar qux". You need to match non-whitespace to avoid matching multiple words.

Mark Byers 2009-11-27 19:32:33

Corrected for that :-)

Thrawn 2009-11-27 19:38:22

Here's another test case: 'foo ba(r baz qu)x quux.' The poster didn't specify what he wanted in this case, so I don't know what the correct result should be, but we differ in our outputs for this case.

Mark Byers 2009-11-27 19:51:15

Answer 3

A:

If speed isn't an issue and you want to avoid overcomplicated regular expressions, you can use String.Split on " " to create an array of "words", iterate through each word, replace any that String.Contains "(" with an empty string, then use String.Join with a separator of "" to get your results.

Sorry can't send the codez, don't have a VB.NET compiler on hand.

Phil 2009-11-27 19:19:21

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