CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubyregex
Stephen M
Stephen M

Reputation: 181

How to add space before and after the special characters in ruby?

Hi I want to add a space before and after the special characters in the string

Frozen/Chilled/Ambient (Please state)

I want the result like

Frozen / Chilled / Ambient ( Please state )

Are there any possibilities to add the space in ruby regexp?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2145

Answers (4)

marmeladze
marmeladze

Reputation: 6564

This might be a quick solution. 

"Frozen/Chilled/Ambient (Please state)".split("/").join(" / ")
# => "Frozen / Chilled / Ambient (Please state)"

A few minutes after, Cary Swoveland will come and comment, "Hey son, there are enough string methods to solve this problem, your solution is quite ineffective" -))

For that case, below snippet uses string methods, and matches everythin except letters digit and space.

q = "Frozen/Chilled/Ambient (Please state)"
puts q.gsub(/[^a-zA-Z0-9. ]/){|s| " #{s} "}
#=> Frozen / Chilled / Ambient  ( Please state )

without blocks. 

q.gsub(/([^a-zA-Z0-9.])/, ' \1 ')
#=> Frozen / Chilled / Ambient    ( Please   state )

Upvotes: 4

Deepak Mahakale
Deepak Mahakale

Reputation: 23661

Don't need to use complex regex

You can make use of block syntax of gsub

"Frozen/Chilled/Ambient (Please state)".gsub(/\W+/) {|w| " #{w} "}
#=> "Frozen / Chilled / Ambient  ( Please   state ) "

If you want to remove the duplicate spaces you can use squish

"Frozen/Chilled/Ambient (Please state)".gsub(/\W+/) {|w| " #{w} "}.squish
#=> "Frozen / Chilled / Ambient ( Please state )"

NOTE:

  • \W - matches any non-word character
  • squish - Removes surrounding white spaces and change multiple spaces to 1

EDIT:

As per the comment if can also make use of /[[:punct:]]/

 [[:punct:]] =>  [!"\#$%&'()*+,\-./:;<=>?@\[\\\]^_`{|}~]

Upvotes: 8

Gagan Gami
Gagan Gami

Reputation: 10251

Try String#gsub:

> sample = "Frozen/Chilled/Ambient (Please state)"
#=> "Frozen/Chilled/Ambient (Please state)" 
> sample.gsub!("/", " / ")
#=> "Frozen / Chilled / Ambient (Please state)"

Note: gsub! will override variable's value itself

Update:

as per your comment you want to add space before and after each special characters:

> pattern = /[^a-zA-Z0-9|(|)|_|\s\-]/
> sample.gsub(pattern){|match|" #{match} "}
#=> "Frozen / Chilled / Ambient (Please state)"

Note: pattern covers all special characters

Upvotes: 4

m26a
m26a

Reputation: 1413

Try this:

sample = "Frozen/Chilled/Ambient (Please state)"
sample.gsub(/([^\w\s])/, ' \1 ')

It is getting everything is not a \w (\w is a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and the undescore _) or space \s. Then gsub replaces the element found by itself with space before and after.

Upvotes: 4

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