Regular expression question

ruby-talk
1

I'm trying to replace all characters that are not letters numbers and
white spaces in a string. I'm getting the characters eliminated in this
case a comma but the white space is eliminated to. How do I get around
that?

string = 'john, tony'
newTerms = string.gsub(/\W/, "")

thanks

···

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2

I think this does what you want, provided underscores are OK.

    newTerms = string.gsub(/[^\w\s]/, "")

If underscores are not OK, then you'll need to change "\w" into "A-Za-z0-9".

Eric

···

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Sam Ginko <ginkod@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm trying to replace all characters that are not letters numbers and
white spaces in a string. I'm getting the characters eliminated in this
case a comma but the white space is eliminated to. How do I get around
that?

string = 'john, tony'
newTerms = string.gsub(/\W/, "")

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Please visit http://LearnRuby.com for all the details.

3

This is usually more efficient:

newTerms = string.gsub(/[^\w\s]+/, "")

Note the "+".

Kind regards

robert

···

2008/6/26 Eric I. <rubytraining@gmail.com>:

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Sam Ginko <ginkod@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm trying to replace all characters that are not letters numbers and
white spaces in a string. I'm getting the characters eliminated in this
case a comma but the white space is eliminated to. How do I get around
that?

string = 'john, tony'
newTerms = string.gsub(/\W/, "")

I think this does what you want, provided underscores are OK.

   newTerms = string.gsub(/[^\w\s]/, "")

If underscores are not OK, then you'll need to change "\w" into "A-Za-z0-9".

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use.inject do |as, often| as.you_can - without end