Question

I’m trying to learn RegEx in Ruby, based on what I’m reading in ‘The Rails Way‘. But, even this simple example has me stumped. I can’t tell if it is a typo or not:

text.gsub(/\s/, '-').gsub([^\W-], '').downcase 

It seems to me that this would replace all spaces with -, then anywhere a string starts with a non letter or number followed by a dash, replace that with ”. But, using irb, it fails first on ^:

syntax error, unexpected ‘^’, expecting ‘]’

If I take out the ^, it fails again on the W.

Answer 1

>> text = 'I love spaces' => 'I love spaces' >> text.gsub(/\s/, '-').gsub(/[^\W-]/, '').downcase => '--' 

Missing //

Although this makes a little more sense 🙂

>> text.gsub(/\s/, '-').gsub(/([^\W-])/, '\1').downcase => 'i-love-spaces' 

And this is probably what is meant

>> text.gsub(/\s/, '-').gsub(/[^\w-]/, '').downcase => 'i-love-spaces' 

\W means ‘not a word’ \w means ‘a word’

The // generate a regexp object

/[^\W-]/.class => Regexp