Dear all,

I have a variable called place_birth in my dataset. Some of the locations weren't recorded properly.

place_birth

Feucherolles (Saint-James = Le château royal de Sainte-Gemme)
ST B(?), canton de Chaillot
(?Chanvrand)Canton de La Guiche
Seine-Inférieure (Seine-Maritime)
Épinay-sur-Seine ,
Autine (?) Outines
Darrois ? Darvois

I would like to do two things.
First, separate what is inside parenthesis () and comma , and = from the text. With what I separate I can create an new variable called place_new
Second, clean both variable from weird signs like ?, =, . at the end, /, etc...

For example
Épinay-sur-Seine ,

should look like
Épinay-sur-Seine

replace ? and (?) with a comma
Autine (?) Outines
it becomes
Autine , Outines

For this one:
Feucherolles (Saint-James = Le château royal de Sainte-Gemme)

Eliminate "Saint-James =" and just leave:
Feucherolles (Le château royal de Sainte-Gemme)

Then I can separate the strings by comma and parenthesis so that for example:

place_birth
(?Chanvrand)Canton de La Guiche

becomes:
place_new
Chanvrand

Or:
place_birth
Seine-Inférieure (Seine-Maritime)

Becomes in the new var:
place_new
Seine-Maritime