A common task during data cleaning is to remove unnecessary fluff from variables, column names or other strings.

Here is an easy way to do it using the stringr package.

 
# define strings to be removed
string_remove <- c("one", "two")
 
# remove strings in a variable
# this will search for everything in string_remove and remove all matches
df %>%
	mutate(variable = str_remove_all(variable, paste(string_remove, collapse = "|")))
 

If you want to remove strings from the column names, do this:

colnames(df) = str_remove_all(colnames(df), paste(string_remove, collapse = "|"))