From: Benoit Daloze <eregontp@...>
Date: 2010-10-10T19:15:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Better way to remove all occurrence of matches on a String

On 10 October 2010 03:39, Josh Cheek <josh.cheek@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think gsub with an empty string is ugly too, but I am pretty confident
> there is not a better way.

So I am not the only to think that :)

> You need to be careful, though, delete and tr don't work the way you think
> they work. They are based on characters not words. They don't work with
> regex because they consider the input string to be a set of characters, and
> that doesn't make sense with regex.
>
> "abcde".delete("bd") # => "ace"
> "abcde".tr("bd","12") # => "a1c2e"
>

Yes, I know, I proposed to add some functionality to #delete.
>> I would then go for #delete, adding a special case for RegExp
>> arguments, but that is not consistent with current behavior with a String.

That is indeed a consistence issue.
However, the semantic of "delete" (in general) seems right to me to
delete/remove a part of a String (and I think is makes even more sense
than the current implementation which does tr(str,'')).