From: Brian Tully <btully@...>
Date: 2004-06-23T04:54:32+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie question - how to replace multiple whitespace within astring?

on 6/22/04 3:36 PM, Joel VanderWerf at vjoel@PATH.Berkeley.EDU wrote:

> Brian Tully wrote:
> 
>> Should I use state.squeeze(" ") to ensure that it always returns the state
>> even if nothing was changed? squeeze! seems to return nil if nothing needs
>> to be changed.
> 
> str.squeeze! is destructive (changes the String object referred to by
> str), and str.squeeze is not. So it just depends on whether you need to
> keep the original string intact (I'd guess not).


Hmmm I'm a little hazy...

I want Ruby to strip out any instances of multiple whitespace and return the
"correct" string. I also want it to return the string regardless of whether
the squeeze function modified it.

So in these examples I would hope for the following:

     @state = @user['state'].squeeze(" ")

if @user['state'] was originally "New   York" I would hope that the above
would set @state to "New York".

In addition if @user['state'] was originally "California" I would hope that
the above would still set @state to "California".



squeeze! - Squeezes str in place, returning either str, or  nil if no
changes were made.

I interpret this as if no changes were made "nil" will be returned, so in my
example of "California" wouldn't this set @state to nil?