Home/ Questions/Q 9062205
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-16T15:40:52+00:00

Case 1(Trailing space) > on behalf of all of us .split(/\W+/) => [on, behalf,

  • 0

Case 1(Trailing space)

> "on behalf of all of us  ".split(/\W+/)
 => ["on", "behalf", "of", "all", "of", "us"]

but if there is leading space then it gives following

Case 2(Leading space)

> "  on behalf of all of us".split(/\W+/)
 => ["", "on", "behalf", "of", "all", "of", "us"]

I was expecting result of Case 1 for Case 2 also.

ADDED

> "@dhh congratulations!!".split(/\W+/)
 => ["", "dhh", "congratulations"]

Would anyone please help me to understand the behavior?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    [Update]

    Skip regex, just Split on space!

    > "@dhh congratulations!!".split
 => ["@dhh", "congratulations"]

    \W matches any non-word character including space. so as the parser sees a space in start & some chars AFTER the space; it splits. But if the space it at the end, there is no other wordy char[a-zA-Z0-9] present to split with.

    To get consistent behavior, you should remove whitespaces using #strip method.

    Case 1(Trailing space)

    1.9.3p327 :007 > " on behalf of all of us ".strip.split(/\W+/) 
 => ["on", "behalf", "of", "all", "of", "us"]

    Case 2(Leading space)

    1.9.3p327 :008 > "on behalf of all of us ".strip.split(/\W+/) 
 => ["on", "behalf", "of", "all", "of", "us"]
    • 0