Ruby: Understanding Regex

I am trying to write a script that will match all words in a string and will strip all non words (IE: . [dot], ampersands, colons, etc) out and will replace them with a hyph开发者_C百科en.

Example String:

L. L. Cool J & Sons: The Cool Kats

Example Output:

L-L-Cool-J-Sons-The-Cool-Kats

Here is some code I am working with:

str = "L. L. Cool J & Sons: The Cool Kats"
str.scan(/\w+/)

Thanks for all the help! I am still pretty new to regex

In a single line, find all bits of text that aren't "word characters" and replace with a dash:

str.gsub(/\W+/, '-')

Note that "word characters" includes numbers and underscores. To just allow letters you could use the following:

str.gsub(/[^A-Za-z]+/, '-')

Update: I just noticed that the two calls can be expressed as one:

str.gsub(/\W+/, '-')
=> "L-L-Cool-J-Sons-The-Cool-Kats"

...which results to the same as Narendra's answer or my original answer:

# 1st gsub: replace all non-words with hyphens
# 2nd gsub: replace multiple hyphens with a single one
str.gsub(/\W/,'-').gsub(/-+/, '-')
=> "L-L-Cool-J-Sons-The-Cool-Kats"

str.gsub(/\W/, '-')          #=> replaces all non-words with space
                             # OR
str.gsub(/[^A-Za-z\s]/, ' ') #=> replace all non letters/spaces with space
str.gsub(/\s+/, '-')         #=> replaces all groups of spaces to hypens

Input:

L. L. Cool J & Sons: The Cool Kats

Output:

L-L-Cool-J-Sons-The-Cool-Kats

You can use \W for non word characters. It should do your job. \w stands for word characters. I don't work much with ruby but it should look something like this result = subject.gsub(/\W+/, '-') .