Question

I want to take a string of characters, parse out only the numbers, and then print that string of numbers to stdout. It has to be done with one line using the ruby -e switch on the command line. It must be one line because I’m using this as part of a applescript with the do shell script command.

Here’s the code I came up with:

ruby -e '%{303-123-4567}.to_s.chars.to_a {|char| print char if char =~ /\d/}'

I realize print is being called for each digit. It’s Friday and my brain is fried. 🙂 Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thank you!

Answer 1

You could just use gsub:

$ ruby -e 'print %{303-123-4567}.gsub(/[^\d]/, "")'
3031234567