Remove all text between two brackets

Question

Suppose I have some text like this,

text<-c(\"[McCain]: We need tax policies that respect the wage earners and job creators. [Obama]: It\'s harder to save         


        

Answer 1

The following should do the trick. The ? forces a lazy match, which matches as few . as possible before the subsequent ].

gsub('\\[.*?\\]', '', text)