I'm having trouble achieving the results I want using a regular expression.
I want to eliminate all characters that fall within square brackets as well
as the brackets themselves, returning an "". I'm not sure if it's R's use of
double slash escapes or something else that is tripping me up. If I only use
one slash I get
1: '\[' is an unrecognized escape in a character string
2: '\]' is an unrecognized escape in a character string
3: unrecognized escapes removed from "\[*.\]"

Below is my self-contained code followed by sessionInfo().

Thanks in advance for your help. I'm going to be doing a lot of text mining
in the near future. I have an excellent O'Reilly book on regex's. What is
the best reference for R's special treatment of these animals?
Mark


myCharVec <- c("[the rain in spain]", "(the rain in spain)")
gsub('\\[*.\\]', '', myCharVec)

#what I get
# [1] "[the rain in spai"   "(the rain in spain)"

#what I want
[1] ""   "(the rain in spain)"

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.10.0 Under development (unstable) (2009-08-12 r49193)
x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
 [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
 [5] LC_MONETARY=C              LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
 [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices datasets  utils     methods   base

other attached packages:
[1] RWeka_0.3-20 tm_0.4

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] grid_2.10.0 rJava_0.6-3 slam_0.1-3


------------------------------------------------------------
Mark W. Kimpel MD  ** Neuroinformatics ** Dept. of Psychiatry
Indiana University School of Medicine

15032 Hunter Court, Westfield, IN  46074

(317) 490-5129 Work, & Mobile & VoiceMail

"The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do." -- B.
F. Skinner
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