I'm trying to split a string and counts the number os words using Ruby but I want ignore special characters.
For example, in this string "Hello, my name is Hugo ..." I'm splitting it by spaces but the last ... should't counts because it isn't a word.
I'm using string.inner_text.split(' ').length. How can I specify that special characters (such as ... ? ! etc.) when separated from the text by spaces are not counted?
Thank you to everyone, Kind Regards, Hugo
"Hello, my name is não ...".scan /[^*!@%\^\s\.]+/
# => ["Hello,", "my", "name", "is", "não"]
/[^*!@%\^]+/ will match anything other than *!@%\^. You can add more to this list which need not be matched
this is part answer, part response to @Neo's answer: why not use proper tools for the job?
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/Regexp.html says:
POSIX bracket expressions are also similar to character classes. They provide a portable alternative to the above, with the added benefit that they encompass non-ASCII characters. For instance, /\d/ matches only the ASCII decimal digits (0-9); whereas /[[:digit:]]/ matches any character in the Unicode Nd category.
- /[[:alnum:]]/ - Alphabetic and numeric character
- /[[:alpha:]]/ - Alphabetic character
- ...
Ruby also supports the following non-POSIX character classes:
- /[[:word:]]/ - A character in one of the following Unicode general categories Letter, Mark, Number, Connector_Punctuation
you want words, use str.scan /[[:word:]]+/
