From: Jeremy Bopp <jeremy@...>
Date: 2010-12-14T05:24:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Substituting New Line Character

On 12/13/2010 02:14 PM, A. Mcbomb wrote:
> Thanks Jeremy.
> Everythin looks good if I use <br> where I need it and then view it with 
> a browser. The text I'm dealing with is HTML but I'm trying to get rid 
> of all the HTML tags and get the raw data into a text file on my Red Hat 
> machine.
> 
> I tried iterating through each line of the HTML text and using:
> 
>    j.gsub!("substituton for where I want the new line", "carriage 
> return")
> 
> For "carriage return", I have tried using \r and \n but it puts those in 
> literally and does not force a carriage return when I open up the file 
> in VI.
> 
> It seems like \n and \r are not working in this case.

They do work actually:

irb(main):001:0> a = "hello world"
=> "hello world"
irb(main):002:0> a.gsub!(" ", "\n")
=> "hello\nworld"
irb(main):003:0> puts a
hello
world
=> nil

As you can see, the string gets the newline character inserted in place
of the space character in this example.

Can you reproduce this problem with a trivial example?  I suspect that
if you try that you might find the problem.  What's going wrong is not
readily apparent to me with the information available.

-Jeremy