gsub with “|” character in R

Question

I have a data frame with strings under a variable with the | character. What I want is to remove anything downstream of the | character.

For ex

Answer 1

Maybe a better job for strsplit than for a gsub

And yes, it looks like the pipe does need to be escaped.

string <- "heat-shock protein hsp70, putative | location=Ld28_v01s1:1091329-1093293(-) | length=654 | sequence_SO=chromosome | SO=protein_coding"
strsplit(string, ' \\| ')[[1]][1]

That outputs

"heat-shock protein hsp70, putative"

Note that I'm assuming you only want the text from before the first pipe, and that you want to drop the space that separates the pipe from the piece of the string you care about.