Question

How can I remove “www”, “http://”, “https://” from strings using Ruby?

I tried this but it didn’t work:

s.gsub('/(?:http?:\/\/)?(?:www\.)?(.*)\/?$/i', '')

Here what I’m doing in Rails:

<%= auto_link(job.description) do |url| url.truncate(25).gsub('http://', '') end %>

Url are truncated, but my goal is to remove the beginning of the links, such as “www” or “http://” so the link would look like “google.com/somepage/d…”, not like “http://google.com/some…”

Answer 1

s = s.sub(/^https?\:\/\//, '').sub(/^www./,'')

If you don’t want to use s =, you should use sub!s instead of all subs.

The problems with your code are:

1. Question mark always follows AFTER an optional character
2. Always replace one pattern in a sub. You can “chain up” multiple operations.
3. Use sub instead of gsub and ^ in the beginning of Regexp so it only replaces the http:// in the beginning but leaves the ones in the middle.