From: Mat Schaffer <schapht@...>
Date: 2006-06-29T02:10:29+09:00
Subject: Re: remove all illegal chars form string

On Jun 28, 2006, at 9:09 AM, thomas coopman wrote:
> 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"
>
> 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.
>
> Thanks

The regexp for such a thing would be:

"exam@p  Le3|�".gsub(/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/, "")
  => "exampLe3" (you listed 3 as a legal character in the above  
email.  /[^a-zA-Z]/ would remove numbers as well)

Probably about time to learn some regular expressions.  Have a look  
at http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html
You'll really start to like them once you learn even just the basic  
matching ideas.
-Mat