How to match full words and not substrings in Ruby

Question

This is my code

stopwordlist = \"a|an|all\"
File.open(\'0_9.txt\').each do |line|
line.downcase!
line.gsub!( /\\b#{stopwordlist}\\b/,\'\')
File.open(\'0_9_2.         


        

Answer 1

The | operator in regex takes the widest scope possible. Your original regex matches either \ba or an or all\b.

Change the whole regex to:

/\b(?:#{stopwordlist})\b/

or change stopwordlist into a regex instead of a string.

stopwordlist = /a|an|all/

Even better, you may want to use Regexp.union.