Question: How to remove curly brackets in R?
Eg. "{abcd}" to "abcd"

How can I use gsub function in R to do this? If any other method is available, please suggest.

Answer: 
```
x <- "{abcd}"
gsub("^\\{+(.+)\\}+$", '\\1', x)

```

This will remove all braces on either end of the string. The difference between this and @Dickoa's answer is that this would leave any braces inside the string alone.
I tend to do it in 2 steps with the argument `fixed = TRUE`, which will speed up things quite a bit.

```
x <- "{abcd}"
res1 = gsub("{", "", x, fixed = TRUE)
res1 = gsub("}", "", res1, fixed = TRUE)

```

and some benchmarks will tell you thats it about twice as fast:

```
mc = microbenchmark::microbenchmark(times = 300,
  a={
    gsub("\\{|\\}", "", x)
  },
  b = {
    gsub("[{}]", "", x)
  },
  c = {
    gsub("^\\{+(.+)\\}+$", '\\1', x)
  },
  d = {
    res2 = gsub("{", "", x, fixed = TRUE)
    gsub("}", "", res2, fixed = TRUE)
  }
)
mc

```

> 
> 
> ```
> Unit: microseconds
>     expr   min    lq     mean median    uq    max neval
>     a 5.120 5.121 5.864220 5.6900 5.690 18.774   300
>     b 5.120 5.121 5.947683 5.6900 5.690 21.050   300
>     c 6.827 7.112 8.027910 7.3965 7.965 35.841   300
>     d 1.707 2.277 2.877600 2.8450 2.846 14.223   300
> 
> ```
> 
>