Ruby string split into words ignoring all special characters: Simpler query

Question

I need a query to be split into words everywhere a non word character is used. For example:

query = "I am a great, boy's and I like! to have: a lot-of-fun and @do$$nice&acti*vities+enjoy good ?times."

Should output:

["I", "am", "a", "great", "", "boy", "s", "and", "I", "like", "", "to", "have", "", "a", "lot", "of", "fun", "and", "", "do", "", "nice", "acti", "vities", "enjoy", "good", "", "times"]

This does the trick but is there a simpler way?

query.split(/[ ,'!:\\@\\$\\&\\*+?.-]/)

@sawa I don't need the empty string. Thanks for your answer. — Karan Verma, Oct 22 '13 at 05:36

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 22 '13 at 05:30

6

query.split(/\W+/)
# => ["I", "am", "a", "great", "boy", "s", "and", "I", "like", "to", "have", "a", "lot", "of", "fun", "and", "do", "nice", "acti", "vities", "enjoy", "good", "times"]

query.scan(/\w+/)
# => ["I", "am", "a", "great", "boy", "s", "and", "I", "like", "to", "have", "a", "lot", "of", "fun", "and", "do", "nice", "acti", "vities", "enjoy", "good", "times"]

This is different from the expected output in that it does not include empty strings.

answered Oct 22 '13 at 05:30

sawa

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What is the difference between W+ and w+ – Karan Verma Oct 22 '13 at 05:37
1

`\W` is the negation of `\w`. – sawa Oct 22 '13 at 05:37
2

Also I'll be great if you could explain both of them a little bit. Thanks. – Karan Verma Oct 22 '13 at 05:39
For difference between \w and \W refer http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11874234/difference-between-w-and-b-regular-expression-meta-characters It explains \w \b \W \B – vaichidrewar Apr 27 '14 at 06:54

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 22 '13 at 07:31

I am adding this answer as @sawa's did not exactly reproduce the desired output:

#Split using any single non-word character:
query.split(/\W/) #=> ["I", "am", "a", "great", "", "boy", "s", "and", "I", "like", "", "to", "have", "", "a", "lot", "of", "fun", "and", "", "do", "", "nice", "acti", "vities", "enjoy", "good", "", "times"]

Now if you do not want the empty strings in the result just use sawa's answer.

The result above will create many empty strings in the result if the string contains multiple spaces, as each extra spaces will be matched again and create a new splitting point. To avoid that we can add an or condition:

# Split using any number of spaces or a single non-word character:
query.split(/\s+|\W/)

Ruby string split into words ignoring all special characters: Simpler query

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