From: Jim Cochrane <allergic-to-spam@...>
Date: 2006-07-22T05:06:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie Question: delete all non alphanumeric characters

On 2006-07-21, Logan Capaldo <logancapaldo@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 21, 2006, at 3:40 PM, Jim Cochrane wrote:
>
>> On 2006-07-21, Theallnighter Theallnighter  
>> <theallnighter@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>> how can i delete all non alphanumeric characters in a string ? thanks
>>>
>> ...
>> #!/usr/bin/ruby
>>
>> x = "There are 2007 beans and 15234 grains of rice in this bag."
>> puts x
>> x.gsub!(/\W/, '')
>> puts x
>> ...
>>
>>
>
> Well the only "problem" with that is
>
> x = '\w includes_under_scores_too'
>

Woah!  Thanks for pointing that out.  It looks like
http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ruby-doc-bundle/UsersGuide/rg/regexp.html
has a bug:

\w	letter or digit; same as [0-9A-Za-z]

It's missing a _.

Here's a fixed version:


#!/usr/bin/ruby

x = "There are 2007 beans_and 15234 grains of rice in this bag."
puts x
x.gsub!(/\W/, '')
puts x
x.gsub!(/\W|_/, '')
puts "fixed:"
puts x