How to strip leading and trailing quote from string, in Ruby

Question

I want to strip leading and trailing quotes, in Ruby, from a string. The quote character will occur 0 or 1 time. For example, all of the following should be converted to foo,bar:

• "foo,bar"
• "foo,bar
• foo,bar"
• foo,bar

Answer 1

I can use gsub to search for the leading or trailing quote and replace it with an empty string:

s = "\"foo,bar\"" s.gsub!(/^\"|\"?$/, '') 

As suggested by comments below, a better solution is:

s.gsub!(/\A"|"\Z/, '') 

Answer 2

You could also use the chomp function, but it unfortunately only works in the end of the string, assuming there was a reverse chomp, you could:

'"foo,bar"'.rchomp('"').chomp('"') 

Implementing rchomp is straightforward:

class String   def rchomp(sep = $/)     self.start_with?(sep) ? self[sep.size..-1] : self   end end 

Note that you could also do it inline, with the slightly less efficient version:

'"foo,bar"'.chomp('"').reverse.chomp('"').reverse 

EDIT: Since Ruby 2.5, rchomp(x) is available under the name delete_prefix, and chomp(x) is available as delete_suffix, meaning that you can use

'"foo,bar"'.delete_prefix('"').delete_suffix('"')