Question

I have a program that loads some tab-separated lines into a MySQL table. One of the values has tabs in it, which is causing some problems. The data is created column by column, so I need to find a way to strip the tab character out of an individual field with gsub. I do not, however, want to get rid of anything else, like spaces.

Answer 1

It’s really easy \t is the tab character.

result = string.gsub /\t/, ''

or, in-place

string.gsub! /\t/, ''