Delete non-UTF characters from a string in Ruby?

Question

How do I delete non-UTF8 characters from a ruby string? I have a string that has for example \"xC2\" in it. I want to remove that char from the string so that it becomes a valid

Answer 1

You can use /n, as in

text.gsub!(/\xC2/n, '')

to force the Regexp to operate on bytes.

Are you sure this is what you want, though? Any Unicode character in the range [U+80, U+BF] will have a \xC2 in its UTF-8 encoded form.