Using gsub to replace a particular character with a newline (Ruby, Rails console)

ruby-on-rails ruby string newline gsub

23,820

s.description returns a copy of the description so gsub! will only modify the copy and return the modified copy.

Try this:

s.description = s.description.gsub(/;/,"\n")

23,820

Author by

Updated on October 12, 2020

R. Kuroshima over 3 years
Annoying problem. I am trying to replace all semicolon characters in my Model's description field with newline characters (\n). The database is sqlite. The field is of type text.

If I do it manually at the rails console (manually typing the description for a single record using \n for line breaks), the rails console automatically escapes the \n, and the description field becomes filled with \\n.

If I do it programmatically using gsub, I get the following situation:
```
>> s = Sample.find(:first)
```
=> ...details of record ...
```
>> s.description.gsub!(/;/,"\n")
```
=> ...success - it all looks good, new lines in the returned value are represented by \n...
```
>> s.save

=> true

>> reload!

Reloading

=> true

>> s = Sample.find(:first)
```
=> ...details of record ...
```
>> s.description
```
=> ... the description field still has semicolons in it rather than newline characters ...

AHHHHHH!!!!!!!
owl over 14 years

He's using gsub! which will modify-in-place description and save it.
R. Kuroshima over 14 years

That's what I thought too, Radar. However Vincent's solution seems to work. Using the destructive variant of gsub wasn't working for me. The field was unmodified after performing a save. I was working in the rails console if that makes a difference.