From: Calvin Bornhofen <calvin.bornhofen@...>
Date: 2012-12-24T08:19:32+09:00
Subject: Re: trying to strip characters from a line

Hello,

it did not work, because his regular expression is describing a 
different pattern than you want: The \["\], looks for a [ (must be 
escaped in the regular expression, because it is a character with 
special meaning), followed by a ", followed by a ] (as with [), followed 
by a ,. His regular expression worked in his case, because he had ["], 
in his string. You want, as far as I can tell, remove all occurrences of 
those characters.
The regular expression you want is similar: /[\[\]",]/
If you don't know what this does, here's an explanation: The [ denotes 
the beginning of a set, and the ] ends it. The set matches to any 
character inside of it, but only one (because I did not write a 
quantifier like * or + after it).

So, this works:
"A[Aaa[]aa, \"aa".gsub( /[\[\]",]/, '' ) # => "AAaaaa aaa"

Alternatively, you could describe what you want with the regular 
expression /\[|\]|"|,/ since the pipe in regular expressions can be read 
as "or".

Regards

(Tested in Ruby 1.9.3p286; I don't know from the top of my head if the 
behavior would be any different in 1.8)

On 23.12.2012 21:01, Paul Mena wrote:
> Strangely, this didn't work for me:
>
> irb(main):001:0> '["the frustrated musician&#8217;s<br>mountain<br>of
> unsold CDs<br>", "Feb-12-2012"]<br>'.gsub(/\["\],/,'')
>
> => "[\"the frustrated musician&#8217;s<br>mountain<br>of unsold
> CDs<br>\", \"Feb-12-2012\"]<br>"
>