Add a character each x characters in Ruby

Question

I would like to brake a long word in my Ruby on Rails string (something like <wbr> in HTML). Is it possible to tell Ruby "add character x in string y each z characters"?

Answer 1

In Perl it would be somewhere along the lines of s/(\w{42})/$1\n/g

Answer 2

Try

result = subject.gsub(/(.{10})/m, '\1XX')

substituting the number you want for 10 and the replacement string you want for XX

Answer 3

I'm not familiar with rails, but in pure ruby you can always write your own. No idea the amount of speed you give up for something like this if any.

def addcharacter(num, char, string)
 x = 0
 resultstring = ""
 string.each_byte do |byte|
   resultstring << byte.chr
   x += 1
   if x == num
   resultstring << char
   x = 0
   end

 end

   return resultstring
 end

 mystring = "hello there"

 a = addcharacter(2,"*",mystring)
 puts a

Answer 4

If your original string is str = "0123456789abcde" and you want:

• 01234XXX56789XXXabcdeXXX :: use str.gsub(/.{5}/, '\&XXX')
• 01234XXX56789XXXabcde :: use str.scan(/.{5}/).join('XXX')

These will produce slightly different input for str = "012345678abcdef"

• 01234XXX56789XXXabcdeXXXf :: from str.gsub(/.{5}/, '\&XXX')
• 01234XXX56789XXXabcde :: from str.scan(/.{5}/).join('XXX')
• 01234XXX56789XXXabcdeXXXfXXX :: from str.gsub(/.{1,5}/, '\&XXX')
• 01234XXX56789XXXabcdeXXXf :: from str.scan(/.{1,5}/).join('XXX')