How to strip leading and trailing quote from string, in Ruby

Question

I want to strip leading and trailing quotes, in Ruby, from a string. The quote character will occur 0 or 1 time. For example, all of the following should be converted to f

Answer 1

Regexs can be pretty heavy and lead to some funky errors. If you are not dealing with massive strings and the data is pretty uniform you can use a simpler approach.

If you know the strings have starting and leading quotes you can splice the entire string:

string  = "'This has quotes!'"
trimmed = string[1..-2] 
puts trimmed # "This has quotes!"

This can also be turned into a simple function:

# In this case, 34 is \" and 39 is ', you can add other codes etc. 
def trim_chars(string, char_codes=[34, 39])
    if char_codes.include?(string[0]) && char_codes.include?(string[-1])
        string[1..-2]
    else
        string
    end
end