Question

I have a string like:

hn$8m3kj4.23hs@8;

i need to split it as follow: first entry should be of one char length, second entry of 2 chars, third entry of one char, fourth – by 2 chars and so on.

then concatenate one char with two chars entries by a semicolon :

if some chars at the end remains unpaired, they should be displayed as well.

it is important to skip all non alphanumeric chars.

so the final string should be:

h:n8 m:3k j:42 3:hs 8:

see, 8 has no 2 chars pair but it is displayed anyway.

i have tried with a loop but i get huge code.
also tried regexs but it split by wrong number of chars.

Answer 1

you can try this:

 s = "hn$8m3kj4.23hs@8;"

 s.gsub(/\W/, '').scan(/(.)(..)?/).map { |i| i.join ':' }.join ' '
 => "h:n8 m:3k j:42 3:hs 8:"

this will not skip underscores though.

if you need to skip them as well, use this one:

s = "hn$8m3k_j4.23hs@8;_"

s.gsub(/\W|_/, '').scan(/(.)(..)?/).map { |i| i.join ':' }.join ' '
=> "h:n8 m:3k j:42 3:hs 8:"

See live demo here