Question

I am pasting text from a windows plain text file to a text_area. The following regex works on that text in rails only when I manually remove the CRLF line returns from the text in wordpad:

@scan.raw.scan(/(?<=stamps\|\|[a-z,0-9,A-Z])(.*?)(?=\|time)/).each do |body|

The gsub I found in various forums to remove line endings is leaving something behind that confuses the regex:

(from the model)

before_create :remove_returns

def remove_returns
  #get rid of pesky carriage returns
  raw.gsub!(/\r\n?/, "")
end

The line returns show as CRLF when I open the plain text file in question in Notepad++.

Another clue: the output from the rails console when I call the object shows the line returns as some kind of tab-like character, or maybe two spaces, but when I view the object in the show view in the browser it appears as though the character has been removed, even though the regex still does not function.

Answer 1

The problem turned out to be that I was removing the line endings with a before_create method in the model, followed by another method (also before_create) that was relying on having the line endings removed. I performed the action in the controller followed by a “save!” instead.

def create
@scan = Scan.new(params[:scan])

#eliminate pesky carriage returns
@scan.raw.gsub!(/\r\n?/, "")
@scan.raw.gsub("\u000a","")
@scan.raw.gsub!("\u000d","")
@scan.raw.gsub!("\u0009","")
@scan.raw.gsub!("\u000c","")
@scan.raw.gsub!("\u0085","")
@scan.raw.gsub!("\u2028","")
@scan.raw.gsub!("\u2029","")
@scan.raw.gsub!(/0A\0A/u,"")
@scan.save!