How to remove " 's" in a string?

Question

I am going through strings of data for instagram usernames, I have been able to use regex to remove almost all unnecessary characters. I can't figure out how to remove the " 's " trailing the words.

I am able to remove every other special character with regex. I either can remove the apostrophe and not the s, or just skip over it entirely.

follower.list

[1] "@kyrieirving’s" "@jaytatum0"    
> follower.list <- gsub("[^[:alnum:][:blank:]@_]", "", follower.list)

follower.list

[1] "@kyrieirvings" "@jaytatum0"   

Expected:

[1] "@kyrieirving" "@jaytatum0"

Answer 1

Use

['’]s\b|[^[:alnum:][:blank:]@_]

See the regex demo.

Details

• ['’]s\b - ' or ’ and then s at the end of a word
• | - or
• [^[:alnum:][:blank:]@_] - any char but an alphanumeric, horizontal whitespace, @ or _ char

R demo:

> x <- c("@kyrieirving’s", "@jaytatum0")
> gsub("['’]s\\b|[^[:alnum:][:blank:]@_]", "",x)
[1] "@kyrieirving" "@jaytatum0" 

Answer 2

follower.list = c("@kyrieirving’s", "@jaytatum0")
gsub("\\’s$",'',follower.list)

Answer 3

Maybe, if we'd use a word boundary, the problem might be solved:

(@\b[A-Za-z0-9]+\b)

Demo