Question

I have a problem with saving records in MongoDB using Mongoid when they contain multibyte characters. This is the string:

a="Chris \xA5\xEB\xAE\xDFe\xA5"

I first convert it to BINARY and I then gsub it like this:

a.force_encoding("BINARY").gsub(0xA5.chr,"oo")

…which works fine:

=> "Chris oo\xEB\xAE\xDFeoo"

But it seems that I can not use the chr method if I use Regexp:

a.force_encoding("BINARY").gsub(/0x....?/.chr,"")
NoMethodError: undefined method `chr' for /0x....?/:Regexp

Anybody with the same issue?

Thanks a lot…

Answer 1

You can do that with interpolation

a.force_encoding("BINARY").gsub(/#{0xA5.chr}/,"") 

gives

"Chris \xEB\xAE\xDFe"

EDIT: based on the comments, here a version that translates the binary encode string to an ascii representation and do a regex on that string

a.unpack('A*').to_s.gsub(/\\x[A-F0-9]{2}/,"")[2..-3] #=>"Chris "

the [2..-3] at the end is to get rid of the beginning [” and and trailing “]

NOTE: to just get rid of the special characters you also could just use

a.gsub(/\W/,"") #=> "Chris"