regex - re: remove string in brackets and its whitespace

Question

what's the best re way to remove brackets and their content, as well as the trailing whitespace within a string? Note that not every string is formatted equally.

Script:

import pandas as pd
import re

df = pd.DataFrame({'name':
          ['University of Southampton (UK)', 
          'The College of William and Mary', 
          'University of Reading (UK)', 
          'Queensland University (Australia)']})

def cleaning(text):
    cleaned = re.findall(re.compile('^([^,]+).+'), text)
    cleaned = re.findall(re.compile('(.*)'), str(cleaned)) # Why do I have to str() here btw?
    return cleaned

df['name'].apply(lambda x: cleaning(x))

Returns:

0    []
1    []
2    []
3    []

Desired output (no whitespace at the end):

0    University of Southampton
1    The College of William and Mary
2    University of Reading
3    Queensland University

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Only work for this specific case, but you can do

df.name.str.split('(',expand=True)[0].str.strip()