Removing a group of words from a character vector

Question

Let\'s say that I have a character vector of random names. I also have another character vector with a number of car makes and I want to remove any occurrence of a car incid

Answer 1

gsub(x = dat, pattern = paste(car, collapse = "|"), replacement = "")
[1] "Tony" "Dave" "Alex"

Answer 2

Just formalizing 42-'s comment above. Rather than using

car = c("Honda","Ford","Toyota","honda","ford","toyota")

You can just use:

carlist = c("Honda","Ford","Toyota")

gsub(x = dat, pattern = paste(car, collapse = "|"), replacement = "", ignore.case = TRUE)
[1] "Tony" "Dave" "Alex"

That allows you to only put each word you want to exclude in the list one time.