Question

I am trying to write a script that will match all words in a string and will strip all non words (IE: . [dot], ampersands, colons, etc) out and will replace them with a hyphen.

Example String:
L. L. Cool J & Sons: The Cool Kats

Example Output:
L-L-Cool-J-Sons-The-Cool-Kats

Here is some code I am working with:

str = "L. L. Cool J & Sons: The Cool Kats"
str.scan(/\w+/)

Thanks for all the help! I am still pretty new to regex

Answer 1

Update: I just noticed that the two calls can be expressed as one:

str.gsub(/\W+/, '-')
=> "L-L-Cool-J-Sons-The-Cool-Kats"

…which results to the same as Narendra’s answer or my original answer:

# 1st gsub: replace all non-words with hyphens
# 2nd gsub: replace multiple hyphens with a single one
str.gsub(/\W/,'-').gsub(/-+/, '-')
=> "L-L-Cool-J-Sons-The-Cool-Kats"