Question

If I wanted to remove things like:
.!,'”^-# from an array of strings, how would I go about this while retaining all alphabetical and numeric characters.

Allowed alphabetical characters should also include letters with diacritical marks including à or ç.

Answer 1

You should use a regex with the correct character property. In this case, you can invert the Alnum class (Alphabetic and numeric character):

"◊¡ Marc-André !◊".gsub(/\p{^Alnum}/, '') # => "MarcAndré"

For more complex cases, say you wanted also punctuation, you can also build a set of acceptable characters like:

"◊¡ Marc-André !◊".gsub(/[^\p{Alnum}\p{Punct}]/, '') # => "¡MarcAndré!"

For all character properties, you can refer to the doc.