How do I remove carriage returns with Ruby?

Question

I thought this code would work, but the regular expression doesn't ever match the \r\n. I have viewed the data I am reading in a hex editor and verified there really is a hex D and hex A pattern in the file.

I have also tried the regular expressions /\xD\xA/m and /\x0D\x0A/m but they also didn't match.

This is my code right now:

   lines2 = lines.gsub( /\r\n/m, "\n" )    if ( lines == lines2 )        print "still the same\n"    else        print "made the change\n"    end 

In addition to alternatives, it would be nice to know what I'm doing wrong (to facilitate some learning on my part). :)

Answer 1

Use String#strip

Returns a copy of str with leading and trailing whitespace removed.

e.g

"    hello    ".strip   #=> "hello"    "\tgoodbye\r\n".strip   #=> "goodbye" 

---

Using gsub

string = string.gsub(/\r/," ") string = string.gsub(/\n/," ") 

Answer 2

Generally when I deal with stripping \r or \n, I'll look for both by doing something like

lines.gsub(/\r\n?/, "\n"); 

I've found that depending on how the data was saved (the OS used, editor used, Jupiter's relation to Io at the time) there may or may not be the newline after the carriage return. It does seem weird that you see both characters in hex mode. Hope this helps.