From: "Alexandru E. Ungur" <alexandru@...>
Date: 2006-06-29T02:10:00+09:00
Subject: Re: remove all illegal chars form string

>>> sender: "thomas coopman" date: "Wed, Jun 28, 2006 at 10:09:35PM +0900" <<<EOQ
> Hi,
Hi,

> Is there a simple way to remove all but the legal chars from a string.  
> where the legal chars are for example: a-z A-Z 0-9
> So everything should be removed from the string but these characters.
> "exam@p  Le3|�" --> "exampLe"
Taking your example, if legal chars are a-z A-Z 0-9 then
the output of:
    "exam@p  Le3|�"
should be:
    "exampLe3" and not "exampLe"...
 
> I don't know very much about regular expressions, so I don't know if 
> it's possible with sub or gsub.  My first Idea was to loop over the 
> string and check every character but I wondered if there is something 
> more simple or better.
Yes, this is why regexps were invented :)
# irb
irb(main):001:0> "exam@p  Le3|�".gsub(/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/,'')
=> "exampLe3"

> Thanks
You're welcome,
Alex