Gsub question on special charaters

Ruby
1

I have a string that looks like this :

ts = “^LThe beginning of the sentence”

I want to remove the “^L”

I’ve tried

ts.gsub!(/^[^L]/,’’)

which removes the “^”, but I need to remove the “^L” when they are
together and at the beginning of the sentence.

Any help is welcome

2

On Nov 20, 11:18 am, Robert K. [email protected] wrote:

which removes the “^”, but I need to remove the “^L” when they are
together and at the beginning of the sentence.

irb(main):001:0> ts = “^LThe beginning of the sentence”
=> “^LThe beginning of the sentence”
irb(main):002:0> ts.sub /^^L/, ‘’
=> “The beginning of the sentence”

Also:

  1. Do you really mean ^ (start of line) or do you mean \A (start of
    string)?
  2. No need to use gsub if there’s only ever going to be a single
    match.
3

Yours doesn’t work because characters in the square brackets can’t be
escaped. Instead of matching that character, it will match “”, “^”,
or “L”. Phrogz has the right answer; just thought I’d explain why his
works and yours doesn’t.

Ben

4

ts.gsub!(/^^L/,’’)

5

Thanks! The explanation helped. I just ordered
Mastering Regular Expressions
http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Regular-Expressions-Jeffrey-Friedl/dp/0596528124/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195585371&sr=1-1

Mastering Regular Expressions
http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Regular-Expressions-Jeffrey-Friedl/dp/0596528124/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195585371&sr=1-1
by Jeffrey Friedl

–
Robert K.

[email protected]