gsub ASCII code characters from a string in ruby

Question

Hi,

I am using nokogiri to screen scrape some HTML. In some occurrences, I am getting some weird characters back, I have tracked down the ASCII code for these characters with the following code:

  @parser.leads[0].phone_numbers[0].each_byte  do |c|
    puts "char=#{c}"
  end

The characters in question have an ASCII code of 194 and 160.

I want to somehow strip these characters out while parsing.

I have tried the following code but it does not work.

@parser.leads[0].phone_numbers[0].gsub(/160.chr/,'').gsub(/194.chr/,'')

Can anyone tell me how to achieve this?

Thanks

Paul

Answer 1

First thought would be should you be using gsub! instead of gsub

gsub returns a string and gsub! performs the substitution in place

Answer 2

Your problem is that you want to do a method call but instead you're creating a Regexp. You're searching and replacing strings consisting of the string "160" followed by any character and then the string "chr", and then doing the same except with "160" replaced with "194".

Instead, do gsub(160.chr, '').

Answer 3

You can also try

s.gsub(/\xA0|\xC2/, '')

or

s.delete 160.chr+194.chr