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The other day I needed to take some regular expressions and convert them to strings. And while executing a .to_s on the regular expression itself worked correctly it brought through the regular expression characters so there were things like:

covid[ -]19

where what I was looking for was just the "covid19" bit (I was generating hashtags from the matched regular expressions for the new CovidNearMe News Aggregator). I started digging into the Ruby string library and didn't find what I was looking for - a str_replace like command. I also experimented a bit with tr but that proved to be misleading at best.

Not surprisingly, Stack Overflow came to the rescue and the answer was blindingly simple:

  • Use sub
  • Use gsub

but don't specify a pattern; just specify a string. If you don't have:

.gsub(/foo/,'bar')

but instead

.gsub('foo','bar')

With this approach, you can then either use sub or gsub depending on how you need the search and replace executed. This is a truly ruby-esque approach and one I should have anticipated.