From: David Alan Black <dblack@...>
Date: 2002-07-23T08:45:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Strings and member-operators

Hi --

On Tue, 23 Jul 2002, the Bare wrote:

> Hi:
>
> I'm looking for a way to strip the quotes (and whitespace) off of a
> string.  Right now, I'm using:
>
> class String
>      def stripQuotes
>          s = sub( '^\"', " " )
>          s.sub!( '\"$', " " )
>          return s.strip!
>      end
> end
>
> This hardly strikes me as the most elegant way.  In particular, a nil is
> returned if the string is unquoted, and the only way I can see to get
> around this is by adding more regular expressions to check for the
> existence of quotes.
>
> A problem I'm having is that I can't seem to figure out how to get at
> the underlying string data (like an array) in a member function.

Here are a couple of possible ways to do this (untested for speed (and
multi-line-ness (so please modify as needed)))

  irb(main):035:0> s
  "  \"hi i am a string\" "
  irb(main):036:0> s.strip.sub(/^"(.*)"$/,'\1')
  "hi i am a string"
  irb(main):037:0> s.strip.delete('"')
  "hi i am a string"

The second one is only a good idea if you know that the only "
characters will be the ones you want to get rid of.


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav