Ruby function to remove all white spaces?
RubyStringRuby Problem Overview
What is the Ruby function to remove all white spaces? I'm looking for something kind of like PHP's trim()?
Ruby Solutions
Solution 1 - Ruby
If you want to remove only leading and trailing whitespace (like PHP's trim) you can use .strip, but if you want to remove all whitespace, you can use .gsub(/\s+/, "") instead .
Solution 2 - Ruby
s = "I have white space".delete(' ')
And to emulate PHP's trim() function:
s = " I have leading and trailing white space ".strip
Solution 3 - Ruby
Related answer:
" clean up my edges ".strip
returns
"clean up my edges"
Solution 4 - Ruby
String#strip - remove all whitespace from the start and the end.
String#lstrip - just from the start.
String#rstrip - just from the end.
String#chomp (with no arguments) - deletes line separators (\n or \r\n) from the end.
String#chop - deletes the last character.
String#delete - x.delete(" \t\r\n") - deletes all listed whitespace.
String#gsub - x.gsub(/[[:space:]]/, '') - removes all whitespace, including unicode ones.
Note: All the methods above return a new string instead of mutating the original. If you want to change the string in place, call the corresponding method with ! at the end.
Solution 5 - Ruby
If you are using Rails/ActiveSupport, you can use squish method. It removes white space on both ends of the string and groups multiple white space to single space.
For eg.
" a b c ".squish
will result to:
"a b c"
Solution 6 - Ruby
"1232 23 2 23 232 232".delete(' ')
=> "123223223232232"
Delete works faster =)
user system total real
gsub, s 0.180000 0.010000 0.190000 (0.193014)
gsub, s+ 0.200000 0.000000 0.200000 (0.196408)
gsub, space 0.220000 0.000000 0.220000 (0.222711)
gsub, join 0.200000 0.000000 0.200000 (0.193478)
delete 0.040000 0.000000 0.040000 (0.045157)
Solution 7 - Ruby
Ruby's .strip method performs the PHP equivalent to trim().
To remove all whitespace:
" leading trailing ".squeeze(' ').strip
=> "leading trailing"
@Tass made me aware that my original answer removes duplicate letters in succession - YUCK! I've since switched to the squish method which is smarter about such occurrences if using the Rails framework.
require 'active_support/all'
" leading trailing ".squish
=> "leading trailing"
" good men ".squish
=> "good men"
Solution 8 - Ruby
It's a bit late, but anyone else googling this page might be interested in this version -
If you want to clean up a chunk of pre-formatted text that a user may have cut & pasted into your app somehow, but preserve the word spacing, try this:
content = " a big nasty chunk of something
that's been pasted from a webpage or something and looks
like this
"
content.gsub(/\s+/, " ").strip
#=> "a big nasty chunk of something that's been pasted from a webpage or something and looks like this"
Solution 9 - Ruby
To remove whitespace on both sides: >Kind of like php's trim()
" Hello ".strip
To remove all spaces:
" He llo ".gsub(/ /, "")
To remove all whitespace:
" He\tllo ".gsub(/\s/, "")
Solution 10 - Ruby
" Raheem Shaik ".strip
It will removes left & right side spaces.
This code would give us: "Raheem Shaik"
Solution 11 - Ruby
split.join will blast all spaces anywhere in the string.
" a b c d ".split.join
> "abcd"
It's easy to type and remember, so it's nice on the console and for quick hacking. Arguably not welcome in serious code though as it masks the intent.
(Based on Piotr's comment in Justicle's answer above.)
Solution 12 - Ruby
Also don't forget:
$ s = " I have white space ".split
=> ["I", "have", "white", "space"]
Solution 13 - Ruby
You Could try this
"Some Special Text Values".gsub(/[[:space:]]+/, "")
using :space: removes non breaking space along with regular space.
Solution 14 - Ruby
Use gsub or delete. The difference is gsub could remove tabs, while delete cannot. Sometimes you do have tabs in files which are added by the editors.
a = "\tI have some whitespaces.\t"
a.gsub!(/\s/, '') #=> "Ihavesomewhitespaces."
a.gsub!(/ /, '') #=> "\tIhavesomewhitespaces.\t"
a.delete!(" ") #=> "\tIhavesomewhitespaces.\t"
a.delete!("/\s/") #=> "\tIhavesomewhitespaces.\t"
a.delete!('/\s/') #=> using single quote is unexpected, and you'll get "\tI have ome whitepace.\t"
Solution 15 - Ruby
The gsub method will do just fine.
The gsub method can be called on a string and says:
a = "this is a string"
a = a.gsub(" ","")
puts a
#Output: thisisastring
The gsub method searches for every occurrence of the first argument and replaces it with the second argument. In this case, it will replace every space within the string and remove it.
Another example:
b = "the white fox has a torn tail"
Let's replace every occurrence of the letter " t " with a capital " T "
b = b.gsub("t","T")
puts b
#Output: The whiTe fox has a Torn Tail
Solution 16 - Ruby
"asd sda sda sd".gsub(' ', '')
=> "asdsdasdasd"
Solution 17 - Ruby
For behavior exactly matching PHP trim, the simplest method is to use the String#strip method, like so:
string = " Many have tried; many have failed! "
puts "Original [#{string}]:#{string.length}"
new_string = string.strip
puts "Updated [#{new_string}]:#{new_string.length}"
Ruby also has an edit-in-place version, as well, called String.strip! (note the trailing '!'). This doesn't require creating a copy of the string, and can be significantly faster for some uses:
string = " Many have tried; many have failed! "
puts "Original [#{string}]:#{string.length}"
string.strip!
puts "Updated [#{string}]:#{string.length}"
Both versions produce this output:
Original [ Many have tried; many have failed! ]:40
Updated [Many have tried; many have failed!]:34
I created a benchmark to test the performance of some basic uses of strip and strip!, as well as some alternatives. The test is this:
require 'benchmark'
string = 'asdfghjkl'
Times = 25_000
a = Times.times.map {|n| spaces = ' ' * (1+n/4); "#{spaces}#{spaces}#{string}#{spaces}" }
b = Times.times.map {|n| spaces = ' ' * (1+n/4); "#{spaces}#{spaces}#{string}#{spaces}" }
c = Times.times.map {|n| spaces = ' ' * (1+n/4); "#{spaces}#{spaces}#{string}#{spaces}" }
d = Times.times.map {|n| spaces = ' ' * (1+n/4); "#{spaces}#{spaces}#{string}#{spaces}" }
puts RUBY_DESCRIPTION
puts "============================================================"
puts "Running tests for trimming strings"
Benchmark.bm(20) do |x|
x.report("s.strip:") { a.each {|s| s = s.strip } }
x.report("s.rstrip.lstrip:") { a.each {|s| s = s.rstrip.lstrip } }
x.report("s.gsub:") { a.each {|s| s = s.gsub(/^\s+|\s+$/, "") } }
x.report("s.sub.sub:") { a.each {|s| s = s.sub(/^\s+/, "").sub(/\s+$/, "") } }
x.report("s.strip!") { a.each {|s| s.strip! } }
x.report("s.rstrip!.lstrip!:") { b.each {|s| s.rstrip! ; s.lstrip! } }
x.report("s.gsub!:") { c.each {|s| s.gsub!(/^\s+|\s+$/, "") } }
x.report("s.sub!.sub!:") { d.each {|s| s.sub!(/^\s+/, "") ; s.sub!(/\s+$/, "") } }
end
These are the results:
ruby 2.2.5p319 (2016-04-26 revision 54774) [x86_64-darwin14]
============================================================
Running tests for trimming strings
user system total real
s.strip: 2.690000 0.320000 3.010000 ( 4.048079)
s.rstrip.lstrip: 2.790000 0.060000 2.850000 ( 3.110281)
s.gsub: 13.060000 5.800000 18.860000 ( 19.264533)
s.sub.sub: 9.880000 4.910000 14.790000 ( 14.945006)
s.strip! 2.750000 0.080000 2.830000 ( 2.960402)
s.rstrip!.lstrip!: 2.670000 0.320000 2.990000 ( 3.221094)
s.gsub!: 13.410000 6.490000 19.900000 ( 20.392547)
s.sub!.sub!: 10.260000 5.680000 15.940000 ( 16.411131)
Solution 18 - Ruby
A lot of suggestions work here, but when I read your question and the specific line saying "removing all the whitespace", what came to my mind was this:
" a b c " => "abc"
And if that is really what is required, you can do this simple operation
wide_string = " a b c "
narrow_string = wide_string.delete(" ")
# you can pass all the different kinds
# of whitespaces that you want to remove
puts narrow_string # => "abc"
Solution 19 - Ruby
My personal preference is using the method .tr
as in:
string = "this is a string to smash together"
string.tr(' ', '') # => "thisisastringtosmashtogether"
Thanks to @FrankScmitt for pointing out that to make this delete all whitespace(not just spaces) you would need to write it as such:
string = "this is a string with tabs\t and a \nnewline"
string.tr(" \n\t", '') # => "thisisastringwithtabsandanewline"
Solution 20 - Ruby
I was trying to do this as I wanted to use a records "title" as an id in the view but the titles had spaces.
a solution is:
record.value.delete(' ') # Foo Bar -> FooBar
Solution 21 - Ruby
I'm a bit late to the game, but I remove trailing and leading whitespaces by using strip!. If you have an array, such as I did, I needed to iterate through the array and save it after the instance ended. The ! took care of this. This removed all whitespaces at the end or the beginning, not just the first leading or the last trailing.
For example:
array = ["hello "," Melanie", "is", " new ", "to ", " programming"]
array.each do |i|
i.strip!
end
This would output to: ["hello","Melanie", "is", "new ", "to", "programming"]. I further explored/shared this in a video I made to highlight this code for similar question I had.
I'm newer to programming and using strip did not work as it didn't save it to the array after the loop ended.
Solution 22 - Ruby
I would use something like this:
my_string = "Foo bar\nbaz quux"
my_string.split.join
=> "Foobarbazquux"
Solution 23 - Ruby
Ruby's .scan() and .join() methods of String can also help to overcome whitespace in string.
scan(/\w+/).join will remove all spaces and join the string
string = "White spaces in me".scan(/\w+/).join
=>"Whitespacesinme"
It is also removing space from left and right part of the string. Means ltrim, rtrim and trim. Just in case if someone has background over C, FoxPro or Visual Basic and jump in Ruby.
2.1.6 :002 > string = " White spaces in me ".scan(/\w+/).join => "Whitespacesinme" 2.1.6 :003 > string = " White spaces in me".scan(/\w+/).join => "Whitespacesinme" 2.1.6 :004 > string = "White spaces in me ".scan(/\w+/).join => "Whitespacesinme" 2.1.6 :005 >
Solution 24 - Ruby
You can try this:
"ab c d efg hi ".split.map(&:strip)
in order to get this:
["ab, "c", "d", "efg", "hi"]
or if you want a single string, just use:
"ab c d efg hi ".split.join