How can I remove text within parentheses with a regex

Question

I m trying to handle a bunch of files  and I need to alter then to remove extraneous information in the filenames  notably  I m trying to remove text inside parentheses  For example   filename    Example file  extra descriptor  ext    and I want to regex a whole bunch of files where the parenthetical expression might be in the middle or at the end  and of variable length   What would the regex look like   Perl or Python syntax would be preferred

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I would use

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If a path may contain parentheses then the r          regex is not enough   import os  re  def remove parenthesized chunks path  safeext True  safedir True       dirpath  basename   os path split path  if safedir else      path      name  ext   os path splitext basename  if safeext else  basename          name   re sub r               name      return os path join dirpath  name ext    By default the function preserves parenthesized chunks in directory and extention parts of the path   Example    gt  gt  gt  f   remove parenthesized chunks  gt  gt  gt  f  Example file  extra descriptor  ext    Example file  ext   gt  gt  gt  path   r c  dir  important  example extra  ext untouchable    gt  gt  gt  f path   c   dir  important   example ext untouchable    gt  gt  gt  f path  safeext False   c   dir  important   example ext   gt  gt  gt  f path  safedir False   c   dir   example ext untouchable    gt  gt  gt  f path  False  False   c   dir   example ext   gt  gt  gt  f r c   extra  example extra  ext   safedir False   c     example ext

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For those who want to use Python  here s a simple routine that removes parenthesized substrings  including those with nested parentheses  Okay  it s not a regex  but it ll do the job   def remove nested parens input str          Returns a copy of  input str  with any parenthesized text removed  Nested parentheses are handled         result          paren level   0     for ch in input str          if ch                     paren level    1         elif  ch         and paren level              paren level -  1         elif not paren level              result    ch     return result  remove nested parens  example  extra qualifier  text  test more parens  ext

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If you don t absolutely need to use a regex  useconsider using Perl s Text  Balanced to remove the parenthesis  use Text  Balanced qw extract bracketed    my   extracted   remainder   prefix    extract bracketed   filename                        no warnings  uninitialized         filename    defined  prefix or defined  remainder                     prefix    remainder                    extracted     You may be thinking   quot Why do all this when a regex does the trick in one line  quot   filename    s               Text  Balanced handles nested parenthesis   So  filename    foo  bar baz buz   foo  will be extracted properly   The regex based solutions offered here will fail on this string   The one will stop at the first closing paren  and the other will eat them all      filename    s                   returns  foo buz   foo       filename    s                returns  foo  foo        text balanced example returns  foo   foo   If either of the regex behaviors is acceptable  use a regex--but document the limitations and the assumptions being made

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The pattern that matches substrings in parentheses having no other   and   characters in between  like  xyz 123  in Text  abc xyz 123   is               Details       - an opening round bracket  note that in POSIX BRE    should be used  see sed example below         - zero or more  due to the   Kleene star quantifier  characters other than those defined in the negated character class POSIX bracket expression  that is  any chars other than   and      - a closing round bracket  no escaping in POSIX BRE allowed    Removing code snippets    JavaScript  string replace             g      PHP  preg replace                      string  Perl   s    s             g Python  re sub r                  s  C   Regex Replace str                 string Empty  VB NET  Regex Replace str                    Java  s replaceAll                     Ruby  s gsub                   R  gsub                     x  Lua  string gsub s                    Bash sed  sed  s           g  Tcl  regsub -all               s    result C   std  regex  std  regex replace s  std  regex R                     Objective-C  NSRegularExpression  regex    NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern                 options NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive error  amp error   NSString  modifiedString    regex stringByReplacingMatchesInString string options 0 range NSMakeRange 0   string length   withTemplate       Swift  s replacingOccurrences of                  with      options    regularExpression

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Java code   Pattern pattern1   Pattern compile                    System out println fileName replace matcher1 group 1

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s               So in Python  you d do   re sub r                 filename

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gt  gt  gt  import re  gt  gt  gt  filename    Example file  extra descriptor  ext   gt  gt  gt  p   re compile r              gt  gt  gt  re sub p      filename   Example file  ext

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If you can stand to use sed  possibly execute from within your program  it d be as simple as   sed  s       g

[python] How can I remove text within parentheses with a regex?

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