Question

I am trying to remove numeric words from a phrase. I am writing the following:

phrase = 'hello 234234 word'
words = phrase.split(/\W/)
words.reject!{ |w| w.match(/^\d+$/) }
words.join(' ')

or, one-liner:

phrase = phrase.split(/\W/).reject{ |w| w.match(/^\d+$/) }.join(' ')

Example:

"hello 123 word" should end "hello word"
"hello 123word" should end "hello 123word"
"hello 123.word" should end "hello word"

The problem with this solution is that it removes the word delimiters too. (See the 3rd example above)

Is there a better, neater way to do that and save word delimiters at the same time?

Answer 1

This regex does the job:

phrase.gsub!(/\b\d+\b/, "")

This gsub gets rid of the numeric words.