From: Tom Werner <tom@...>
Date: 2006-06-22T03:34:50+09:00
Subject: Re: Why this code doesn't work?

James Edward Gray II wrote:
> On Jun 21, 2006, at 1:21 PM, Alan Moen wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am trying to replace all html tags and spaces with "*" in a string.
>>
>> I tried this code:
>>
>> "as <b> sd</b>  <b>  ".sub(/<[\s\S]*?>| /,"*")
>>
>> It just replaces the 1st occurance.
>
> Try:
>
>   ...gsub...
>
> Hope that helps.
>
> James Edward Gray II

It's also worth pointing out that [\s\S] means a character class 
containing all whitespace and non whitespace characters--in other words: 
everything. This is equivalent:

"as <b> sd</b>  <b>  ".sub(/<.*?>| /,"*")

which replaces [\s\S] with .

Also, if your tags could have line breaks in them, you can add 'm' (for 
multiline) to the end of the regular expression literal and then . will 
match newlines as well:

/regex/m

Oh, and if you replace that last space (after the pipe character) with 
\s, then it will match tabs too (or any whitespace for that matter).

Tom

-- 
Tom Werner
Helmets to Hardhats
Software Developer
tom@helmetstohardhats.org
www.helmetstohardhats.org