# How to get rid of escaped characters

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-get-rid-of-escaped-characters/127632>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [January 30, 2008, 11:59pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-get-rid-of-escaped-characters/127632 "2008-01-30T23:59:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![liquidrails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/a6a055/32.png) [@liquidrails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/liquidrails)\
**Post date:** [January 30, 2008, 11:59pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-get-rid-of-escaped-characters/127632/1 "2008-01-30T23:59:41Z")

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How do you get rid of unwanted escape characters that rails adds to a  
user inputted string (e.g. like the forward slash in front of quotes,  
etc.?"

Thanks,

Cheri

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**Author:** ![liquidrails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/a6a055/32.png) [@liquidrails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/liquidrails)\
**Post date:** [January 31, 2008, 12:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-get-rid-of-escaped-characters/127632/2 "2008-01-31T00:04:57Z")

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On Wed, 2008-01-30 at 23:59 +0100, Cheri R. wrote:

> How do you get rid of unwanted escape characters that rails adds to a  
> user inputted string (e.g. like the forward slash in front of quotes,  
> etc.?"

* * *

doesn’t ‘h’ do that?

\<%=h @some\_array.value %\>

Craig

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**Author:** ![liquidrails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/a6a055/32.png) [@liquidrails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/liquidrails)\
**Post date:** [January 31, 2008, 12:34am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-get-rid-of-escaped-characters/127632/3 "2008-01-31T00:34:05Z")

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Craig W. wrote:

> On Wed, 2008-01-30 at 23:59 +0100, Cheri R. wrote:
> 
> > How do you get rid of unwanted escape characters that rails adds to a  
> > user inputted string (e.g. like the forward slash in front of quotes,  
> > etc.?"
> 
> * * *
> 
> doesn’t ‘h’ do that?
> 
> \<%=h @some\_array.value %\>
> 
> Craig

Thanks, but I want to get rid of them at the ruby level. - Cheri

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![liquidrails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/a6a055/32.png) [@liquidrails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/liquidrails)\
**Post date:** [January 31, 2008, 12:43am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-get-rid-of-escaped-characters/127632/4 "2008-01-31T00:43:08Z")

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On Thu, 2008-01-31 at 00:34 +0100, Cheri R. wrote:

> > Craig
> 
> Thanks, but I want to get rid of them at the ruby level. - Cheri

* * *

gsub

> **[ActiveSupport::Multibyte::Chars](https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Multibyte/Chars.html#M000552)**
>
> Chars enables you to work transparently with UTF-8 encoding in the Ruby String class without having extensive knowledge about the encoding.

Craig

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![liquidrails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/a6a055/32.png) [@liquidrails](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/liquidrails)\
**Post date:** [January 31, 2008, 1:08am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/how-to-get-rid-of-escaped-characters/127632/5 "2008-01-31T01:08:22Z")

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On 1/30/08, Craig W. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> 

Actually h (alias for html\_escape) does just the reverse, sort of.

I think the OP might be a little confused since he talks about  
inserting forward slashes in front of quotes. This sound like he’s  
looking at the string in irb which uses inspect to display values, and  
string.inspect presents the string as it would appear in a ruby  
literal:

irb(main):002:0\> str = “"To be or not to be" is the beginning of  
Hamlet’s soliloquy”  
=\> “"To be or not to be" is the beginning of Hamlet’s soliloquy”  
irb(main):003:0\> puts str  
“To be or not to be” is the beginning of Hamlet’s soliloquy  
=\> nil

–  
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby  
[http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/](http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/)