Question

how do I use Perl to get rid of text within parentheses? For example:
$str = “This is a (extra stuff) string.”
to
$str = “This is a string.”

I am current using this but it’s not working:
$str =~ s/( ( [^)]+ ) )//;

Thanks!

Answer 1

You need to escape the parentheses, like:

s/\([^)]*\)//g

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Update by popular demand:

To remove the space you can simply remove spaces before the parenthesis. This will work in most cases:

s/\s*\([^)]*\)//g

To handle nested parenthesis you can use a recursive pattern, like so:

s/\s*\((?:[^()]+|(?R))*\)//g

You can read about (?R) and the like in perlre.

The last expression will work for string like aaa (foo(b,a,2*(3+4)) b) (c (c) c) ddd (x)., giving aaa ddd..