From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2008-06-06T15:28:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Removing Special Chars from a String

On 05.06.2008 02:14, Rodrigo Bermejo wrote:
> Jeff Miller wrote:
>> Hello,
>>  I'm pulling some fields out of an Oracle database and creating a CSV.
>> However, some fields have \n and \r in them, which messes up my CSV. Is
>> there a special function or a certain way I should try to get rid of
>> them? I tried using chomp, chomp!, strip, and strip! but I can't seem to
>> get it formatted the right way. An example string would be:
>>
>> "\nhere is some text\r\n\r\nsome more text\n\r\n\reven more text"
>>
>> Any suggestions?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>  - Jeff
> 
> If you want to delete them use this:
> 
> "\nhere is some text\r\n\r\nsome more text\n\r\n\reven more 
> text".gsub(/\r|\n/,"")

This will glue together words that were only separated by special chars. 
  This might be better:

irb(main):001:0> s = "\nhere is some text\r\n\r\nsome more 
text\n\r\n\reven more text"
=> "\nhere is some text\r\n\r\nsome more text\n\r\n\reven more text"

irb(main):002:0> s.gsub(/\s+/,' ')
=> " here is some text some more text even more text"
irb(main):003:0> s.gsub(/\s+/,' ').strip
=> "here is some text some more text even more text"

irb(main):004:0> s.gsub(/[\r\n]+/,' ')
=> " here is some text some more text even more text"
irb(main):005:0> s.gsub(/[\r\n]+/,' ').strip
=> "here is some text some more text even more text"

> You can use: require 'csv'  , it allows you to create/modify CSV with \r 
> & \n without messing up the data.

That's probably even better.

Jeff, note also that there are some nice formatting capabilities in 
SQL*Plus so you might as well create your output from there.

See http://tahiti.oracle.com/ for docs.

Kind regards

	robert