Question

I am trying to use gsub to replace "?" and "." with empty space.

I realize that is a difference between gsub(".", "") and gsub(/./, ""), but I don’t know what it is. Can Someone explain?

Also, gsub("?","") seems to work, and gsub(/?/,"") doesn’t work.
How can we make gsub(/?/,"") work?

Answer 1

Finally as it mentioned above /reg/ represents regexp when "str" represents just a string. Your aim is to remove ? and . from a string. Regexp will do the job:

gsub(/[?.]/, '')

You can read more about ruby regexp here. In my example /[abc]/ will match single character a or b or c.