Stripping non-alphanumeric chars but leaving spaces in Ruby

Question

Trying to change this:

"The basketball-player is great! (Kobe Bryant)"

into this:

"the basketball player is great kobe bryant"

Want to downcase and remove all punctuation but leave spaces...

Tried string.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z ]/, '') but it removes the spaces

Answer 1

You can simply add \s (whitespace)

string.downcase.gsub(/[^a-z0-9\s]/i, '')

Answer 2

If you want to catch non-latin characters, too:

str = "The basketball-player is great! (Kobe Bryant) (ひらがな)"
str.downcase.gsub(/[^[:word:]\s]/, '')
#=> "the basketballplayer is great kobe bryant ひらがな"

Answer 3

Some fine solutions, but simplest is usually best:

string.downcase.gsub /\W+/, ' '