Remove urls from strings

Question

I have the following string, stored in the object `sentence`: ``` sentence <- "aazdlubtirol: RT @tradeDayTrades: sister articles \"$AAPL Dancing in a Burning Room\" January 2013 http://t.co/tkuCRfLy \" $AAPL vs $AAPL \" August 2011 http://t.co/863HkVjn" ``` I am trying to use gsub to remove urls beginning with `http`: `sentence <- gsub('http.*','',sentence)` However, it replaces everything after `http`: `aazdlubtirol: RT @tradeDayTrades: sister articles \"$AAPL Dancing in a Burning Room\" January 2013` What I want is: `aazdlubtirol: RT @tradeDayTrades: sister articles \"$AAPL Dancing in a Burning Room\" January 2013 \" $AAPL vs $AAPL \" August 2011` I am trying to clean up the urls so if a string includes `http` I want to remove the url. I found some solutions but they are not helping me.

Accepted Answer

Add a space to your replacement group:

```
gsub('http.* *', '', sentence)
```

Or using `\s` which is regex for space:

```
gsub('http.*\s*', '', sentence)
```

As per the comment, `.*` will match anything and regular expressions are greedy. Instead we should match one or more non-whitespace character any number of times followed by zero or more spaces:

```
gsub('http\S+\s*', '', sentence)
```

Remove urls from strings

Solution

Problem