How to remove all non - ASCII characters from a string in Ruby

Question

I seems to be a very simple and much needed method. I need to remove all non ASCII characters from a string. e.g © etc. See the following example.

#coding: utf-         


        

Answer 1

You can just literally translate what you asked into a Regexp. You wrote:

I want to get rid of all non ASCII characters

We can rephrase that a little bit:

I want to substitue all characters which don't thave the ASCII property with nothing

And that's a statement that can be directly expressed in a Regexp:

s.gsub!(/\P{ASCII}/, '')

As an alternative, you could also use String#delete!:

s.delete!("^\u{0000}-\u{007F}")