Remove double quotes from string

Question

I'm trying to grab data from a MySQL database and use Ruby to reformat it into a flat text file. Some of my MySQL data contains double quotes like so:

Matthew "Matt" Perry

and I need to remove those quotes and replace them with something else, | for instance.

I found another post on stackoverflow about removing quotes that suggested the following:

s.scan(/'(.+?)'|"(.+?)"|([^ ]+)/).flatten.compact

but that returns the string intact (with double quotes). How can I get

Matthew |Matt| Perry

instead?

Answer 1

This will do it if you don't want to modify s:

new_s = s.gsub /"/, '|'

If you do want to modify s:

s.gsub! /"/, '|'

Answer 2

You could use something like:

text = 'Matthew "Matt" Perry'

text.tr(%q{"'}, '|') # => "Matthew |Matt| Perry"

text = "Matthew 'Matt' Perry"
text.tr(%q{"'}, '|') # => "Matthew |Matt| Perry"