Gsub question

Ruby
1

Hello,

i’m new to ruby, and working mostly with text.
i have this very simple program that reads a file and replaces all ‘’
with a whitespace. (rtf to txt conversion is causing an endless
occurence of 's).
the way i do it :

txt = "Messages posted to this group will make your email address
visible to anyone on the Internet. "
puts txt.gsub(’’ , ’ ')

produces an error:
test.rb:1: unterminated string meets end of file

i’d like to know what i’m doing wrong, or is there another way of
doing it properly.

thanks
t

2

On 4/25/07, [email protected] [email protected] wrote:

the way i do it :

txt = "Messages posted to this group will make your email address
visible to anyone on the Internet. "
puts txt.gsub('' , ’ ')

produces an error:
test.rb:1: unterminated string meets end of file

Within a double quoted string (like your txt) the backslash character
() sets up an escape sequence; so the trailing " is interpreted as
an embedded quote mark. You need to use two backslashes to get the
effect that you’re after, e.g.

txt = "Messages posted to this group... on the Internet. \\"
puts txt.gsub('\\', '')

For more info, see the “Strings” section of this chapter from
Programming Ruby:

http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/tut_stdtypes.html

Hope this helps,

Lyle

3

The slash in the txt variable should be escaped

The escaped version is as below

txt = “Messages posted to this group will make your email address
visible to anyone on the Internet. \”
puts txt.gsub(’\’ , ’ ')

Of course if you are reading the content directly from a file you
need not escape the slashes explicitly

gg.txt

Messages posted to this group will make your email address
visible to anyone on the Internet. \

gg.rb

string = File.read(“gg.csv”)
p string.gsub("\", “”)

Cheers,
Ganesh G…

4

Newbie taking a stab at it…
On Apr 25, 2007, at 6:05 PM, [email protected] wrote:

Hello,
Hello

txt = "Messages posted to this group will make your email address
visible to anyone on the Internet. "
puts txt.gsub(’’ , ’ ')

produces an error:
test.rb:1: unterminated string meets end of file
And right it should! You probably already know, but \ is the escape
thing. It basically means ‘disregard this next character’. So in
fact, that string never ends. A good text editor with coloring would
show that.

But your gsub method looks right :slight_smile:

HTH
---------------------------------------------------------------|
~Ari
“I don’t suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it” --1337est
man alive

5

Thanks All,

Q for Ganesh, was your file extended with .csv or is a text handled
better this way.(are comma separated values an array)?

p string.gsub("\", “”)

i don’t quite understand ‘p string.gsub’. Better do some reading.

what is the difference between a " and a ’ when dealing with text?

Thanks Again
t