How to remove all characters from string except numbers, "," and "." using Ruby?

Question

Please, help me with a regexp for the next task: I have a 'cost' column in some table, but the values there are different:

['1.22','1,22','$1.22','1,22$','$ 1.22']

I need to remove every character except digits and , and .. So I need to get a value that always can be parsed as Float.

Solution 1

a.map {|i| i.gsub(/[^\d,\.]/, '')}
# => ["1.22", "1,22", "1.22", "1,22", "1.22"] 

Solution 2

Try this:

yourStr.gsub(/[^0-9,.]/, "")

Solution 3

To extract the numbers:

a = ["1.22", "1,22", "$1.22", "1,22$", "$ 1.22"]
a.map {|s| s[/[\d.,]+/] }
#=> ["1.22", "1,22", "1.22", "1,22", "1.22"]

Assuming commas , should be treated like decimal points . (as in '1,22' -> 1.22), this should convert your values to float:

a = ["1.22", "1,22", "$1.22", "1,22$", "$ 1.22"]
a.map {|s| s[/[\d.,]+/].gsub(',','.').to_f }
#=> [1.22, 1.22, 1.22, 1.22, 1.22]

Comments

[bsd]

What do you want '1,22' to be interpreted ?

[likeitlikeit]

How would you do that in ruby?

[Olivia Steger]

This was so helpful! Is there any way to keep line breaks in the code? (I'm trying to make a program to clean up a CSV file.)

[ProgramFOX]

@InspectorElement Add \r and \n to the list of characters, then they won't be removed.

[Touseef Murtaza]

Thank you, it worked for me. Just one thing if you want to exclude comma then simply use gsub(/[^0-9.]/, "")