Using regular expression in ruby

I am trying to strip all the <br>'s in a given string.

 def extract(a)
    a=a.delete("/ (\<br\>)+ /")
    puts a
    end

    extract("e<gr>y<br>t<gh>hello")

is giving egytghhello as output. Why is the <r> of <gr> and <> of gh not getting p开发者_JS百科rinted?

String.delete doesn't take a regular expression as an argument, it takes a set of letters, all of which will be deleted from the string it's called on.

So, your code is saying: delete any of <, >, b, r, (, ), +, space, and /.

You'd use String.gsub if you wanted to use a regex to remove parts of a string (or gsub! to do the replacing in-place).

The usual caveats about the unreliability of using regular expressions to deal with HTML apply: consider using something like Nokogiri, particularly if you have any parsing or manipulation requirements above and beyond this.

This should account for <br>, <br /> and <br/> just in case.

str = "Hi and <gr>y<br>t<gh>hello<br />bla<br/> some moar"
puts str.gsub(/<br ?\/?>/,'')

Or using a method like your example:

def extract(str)
   str.gsub(/<br ?\/?>/,'')
end
puts extract("Hi and <gr>y<br>t<gh>hello<br />bla<br/> some moar")

Personally I think is better to have the method return a string and then do puts extract() than having the puts inside the method.

Try the following:

a = a.gsub(/<br>/, '')