Question

Hey, I am using a reg expression to remove parentheses and the content between them from a ruby string. The problem is that this sometimes leaves a space before commas. I am not sure how to go about removing this space. I’ve been playing around with the following but it has not been working:

 @char_count = 0
 sentance.each_char{|char| 
   if char == ","
     if sentance[@char_count-1] == 32
       sentance[@char_count-1] = "" 
     end
   end
   @char_count += 1
 }

Any help is appreciated!

Edit: sentance.gsub!(/ ,/, ‘,’) is working well, but now I am realizing that there are some places where there are multiple spaces before a comma. I need to account for this scenerio as well.

Answer 1

You can use the gsub method of the string class to do this.

s = "this is a string, with some commas with spaces in front ,1 ,2 ,3"
s.gsub(/ ,/, ',')
"this is a string, with some commas with spaces in front,1,2,3"

gsub will return a new string with the space , string replaced by a comma. gsub! will change the string in place.

If you sometimes have multiple spaces with a trailing comma then you may wish to use a slightly modified regex to catch the multiple spaces

s.gsub!(/ +?,/, ',')