How to Remove Special Characters from a String in Ruby?

In this article, we will discuss how to remove special characters from a string in Ruby. In Ruby, special characters can be removed from a string using various methods. Special characters typically include punctuation marks, symbols, and non-alphanumeric characters. Let us explore different methods to remove special characters from a string in Ruby.

Using Regular Expressions

The gsub method with a regular expression pattern can be used to replace all characters that are not word characters with an empty string.

Syntax:

string.gsub(/[^\w\s]/, '')

In the below example, we use the gsub method with a regular expression pattern [^\w\s] to replace all characters that are not word characters (\w, alphanumeric characters and underscores) or whitespace characters (\s) with an empty string.

Ruby

# Removing special characters from a string using Regular Expressions

# Function to remove special characters using regular expressions
def remove_special_characters_regex(str)
    str.gsub(/[^\w\s]/, '')
end

# Example usage:
example_string = "GeekforGeeks?"
puts "Original string: #{example_string}"
puts "After removing special characters: #{remove_special_characters_regex(example_string)}"

Output

Original string: GeekforGeeks?
After removing special characters: GeekforGeeks

Using String#tr Method

The tr method is used to delete special characters from a string.

Syntax:

str.tr('^a-zA-Z0-9 ')

In the below example, we use the tr method with a complemented set ^A-Za-z0-9 to delete all characters that are not alphanumeric (letters or digits) from the string.

Ruby

# Removing special characters from a 
# string using String#tr method

# Function to remove special characters 
#using String#tr method
def remove_special_characters_tr(str)
    str.tr('^A-Za-z0-9', ' ')
end

# Example usage
example_string = "Geekforgeeks?"
puts "Original string: #{example_string}"
puts "After removing special characters: #{remove_special_characters_tr(example_string)}"

Output

Original string: Geekforgeeks?
After removing special characters: Geekforgeeks 

Using String#delete Method

The delete method is used to remove special characters from a string.

Syntax:

string.delete('^a-zA-Z0-9 ')

In the below example,We use the delete method with a complemented set ^a-zA-Z0-9 to remove all characters that are not letters, digits, or spaces from the string.

Ruby

# Removing special characters from a string  
# using String#delete method

# Function to remove special characters using 
# String#delete method
def remove_special_characters_delete(str)
    str.delete('^a-zA-Z0-9 ')
end

# Example usage:
example_string = "GeekforGeeks?"
puts "Original string: #{example_string}"
puts "After removing special characters: #{remove_special_characters_delete(example_string)}"

Output

Original string: GeekforGeeks?
After removing special characters: GeekforGeeks