From: Mark Thomas <mark@...>
Date: 2009-02-06T21:44:27+09:00
Subject: Re: regex \s == \n???

On Feb 6, 7:10 am, Tom Cloyd <tomcl...@comcast.net> wrote:
> I'm trying to remove extra spaces from a long string which has some
> EOLs, using regex. It's not working. Here's a simple demo:
>
> irb(main):004:0> a="\n  abc\n  a  a  a"
> => "\n  abc\n  a  a  a"
> irb(main):005:0> a.gsub(/\s+/,' ')
> => " abc a a a"
>
> I've dug around in my regex references, and all I can say is that is
> hasn't been the least bit helpful. I'm probably not looking for the
> right thing.

A newline is a whitespace char. \s is the same as [ \t\r\n\f]. If you
don't want to match them, remove them. Try
a.gsub(/[ \t]+/,' ')

--Mark