Question

I was using gsub to replace parts of a long string from a text file, eg.

      str.gsub!(/#{str1}/){"#{updates}"}

When the string became long, ruby returned an error that the string is too long. How can I solve this problem? Is there any substitute for gsub that can do the same work? As far as I know, gsub will produce a copy of the original data, which is inefficient.

Answer 1

If str1 is just a string rather than a regex fragment then you can do things like this:

str[str1] = updates

to replace the str1 part of str with updates in place. For example:

>> s = 'Where is X house?'
=> "Where is X house?"
>> s['X'] = 'pancakes'
=> "pancakes"
>> s
=> "Where is pancakes house?"

You’d have to repeat that in a loop of some sort until you got an IndexError if you wanted to replace all the str1s in str though.

Regexes are great but your toolbox should have more than just a hammer.

BTW, if str1 is supposed to be just a string, you should be use Regexp.escape on it before interpolating it into a regex.