Ruby 1.9 strip not removing whitespace

Question

Im doing some screen scraping and im getting back a string that appears to end with whitespace but neither string.strip or strip.gsub(/\s/u, '') removes the character.

Im guessing it's a character encoding issue. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I think, there are a lot of "space characters". You can use something like this:

my_string.gsub("\302\240", ' ').strip

Answer 2

You can try this: my_string.gsub(/\A[[:space:]]+|[[:space:]]+\z/, '')

This should remove all space characters from the beginning and the end of string, including all possible unicode space variations.

Answer 3

Figure out the character code of the last character (str[-1].ord) and explicitly search and destroy it. Rinse/repeat if there exist more unwanted characters after that. After doing this, report back here what the invisible character was. (Perhaps it's only invisible because the font you are using does not have that glyph?)