I'm trying to simply remove the '(' and ')' from the beginning and end of the pandas column series. This is my best guess so far but it just returns empty strings with () intact.

postings['location'].replace('[^\(.*\)?]','', regex=True)

The column looks like this: screenshot of jupyter notebook

Working example

df = pd.DataFrame(dict(location=['(hello)']))print(df)location
0  (hello)

@Psidom's Solution
str.strip

df.location.str.strip('()')0    hello
Name: location, dtype: object

Option 2
str.extract

df.location.str.extract('\((.*)\)', expand=False)0    hello
Name: location, dtype: object

Option 3
str.replace

df.location.str.replace('\(|\)', '')0    hello
Name: location, dtype: object

Option 4
replace

df.location.replace('\(|\)', '', regex=True)0    hello
Name: location, dtype: object