Ruby: How to remove trailing backslashes from a string?

Question

I have a string like

"car\"

which I will be storing in postgres db. I want to remove the backslash from the string before saving. Is there a way I can do that in ruby or in postgres? When I try to remove it in ruby, it considers the quote after the backslash as an escape character.

Answer 1

See following code:

1.9.3p125 :022 > s = "cat\\"
 => "cat\\" 
1.9.3p125 :023 > puts s
cat\
 => nil 
1.9.3p125 :024 > s.chomp("\\")
 => "cat" 
1.9.3p125 :025 > 

Answer 2

People don't do this much, but Ruby's String class supports:

irb(main):002:0> str = 'car\\'
=> "car\\"
irb(main):003:0> str[/\\$/] = ''
=> ""
irb(main):004:0> str
=> "car"

It's a conditional search for a trailing '\', and replacement with an empty string.

Answer 3

To remove a trailing backslash:

"car\\".gsub!(/\\$/, "")

Note that the backslash has to be escaped itself with a backslash.