CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubyregexparsing
sybohy
sybohy

Reputation: 1876

Ruby: Extracting Words From String

I'm trying to parse words out of a string and put them into an array. I've tried the following thing:

@string1 = "oriented design, decomposition, encapsulation, and testing. Uses "
puts @string1.scan(/\s([^\,\.\s]*)/)

It seems to do the trick, but it's a bit shaky (I should include more special characters for example). Is there a better way to do so in ruby?

Optional: I have a cs course description. I intend to extract all the words out of it and place them in a string array, remove the most common word in the English language from the array produced, and then use the rest of the words as tags that users can use to search for cs courses.

Upvotes: 38

Views: 68805

Answers (5)

printfinn
printfinn

Reputation: 86

I would write something like this:

@string
  .split(/,+|\s+/)  # any ',' or any whitespace characters(space, tab, newline)
  .reject(&:empty?)
  .map { |w| w.gsub(/\W+$|^\W+^*/, '') } # \W+$ => any trailing punctuation; ^\W+^* => any leading punctuation

irb(main):047:0> @string1 = "oriented design, 'with', !!qwe,  and testing. can't rubyisgood#)(*#%)(*, and,rails,is,good"
=> "oriented design, 'with', !!qwe,  and testing. can't rubyisgood#)(*#%)(*, and,rails,is,good"
irb(main):048:0> @string1.split(/,+|\s+/).reject(&:empty?).map { |w| w.gsub(/\W+$|^\W+^*/, '')}
=> ["oriented", "design", "with", "qwe", "and", "testing", "can't", "rubyisgood", "and", "rails", "is", "good"]

Upvotes: 1

lazzy.developer
lazzy.developer

Reputation: 229

For me the best to spliting sentences is:

line.split(/[^[[:word:]]]+/)

Even with multilingual words and punctuation marks work perfectly:

line = 'English words, Polski Żurek!!! crème fraîche...'
line.split(/[^[[:word:]]]+/)
=> ["English", "words", "Polski", "Żurek", "crème", "fraîche"]

Upvotes: 22

ayckoster
ayckoster

Reputation: 6837

For Rails you can use something like this:

@string1.split(/\s/).delete_if(&:blank?)

Upvotes: 1

BF4
BF4

Reputation: 1086

Well, you could split the string on spaces if that's your delimiter of interest

@string1.split(' ')

Or split on word boundaries

\W  # Any non-word character

\b  # Any word boundary character

Or on non-words

\s  # Any whitespace character

Hint: try testing each of these on http://rubular.com

And note that ruby 1.9 has some differences from 1.8

Upvotes: 14

David Nehme
David Nehme

Reputation: 21572

The split command.

   words = @string1.split(/\W+/)

will split the string into an array based on a regular expression. \W means any "non-word" character and the "+" means to combine multiple delimiters.

Upvotes: 69

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