From: Tim Pease <tim.pease@...>
Date: 2006-06-29T02:16:55+09:00
Subject: Re: remove all illegal chars form string

On 6/28/06, thomas coopman <thomas.coopman@gmail.com> 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
>
>

You've hit the nail on the head. Use gsub on the string.

"exam@p  Le3|�".gsub(/\W/, '')   # --> exampLe3

The \W in the regular expression matches every character that is not a
valid word character: i.e. [^a-zA-Z0-9_]

Blessings,
TwP