Using Ruby’s gsub with a block

String#gsub is one of the most used Ruby methods in the wild. Just about every Ruby programmer knows about the method and uses it fairly regularly.

Here’s a quick refresher of the typical gsub usage:

# using string match
'John Wayne'.gsub('John', 'Bruce')
=> "Bruce Wayne"

# using regexp match
'John   Wayne'.gsub(/\w+\s+(\w+)/, 'Bruce \1')
=> "Bruce Wayne"

Basically we can replace string and regexp matches with other strings. When doing regexp matches we can access the matched groups individually with \1, \2, etc and embed them in the replacement string. Sometimes, however, some additional processing of the matched data might be required. Consider this trivial example - we might want to increment a matched number by 1. Here gsub’s version that takes a block comes into action:

# num will be passed the string '12'
'Apollo 12'.gsub(/\d+/) { |num| num.to_i.next }
=> "Apollo 13"

Basically we’re replacing the matched portion of the string with the result of the block. While the param enhances the readability of the code it’s not necessary:

# we're not making use of a block param
'Apollo 12'.gsub(/(\d+)/) { Regexp.last_match[1].to_i.next }
=> "Apollo 13"

Regexp.last_match[1] is the OO version of the obscure (but pretty popular) Perlism $1. In this particular case using the block param (as in the first example) is obviously a better idea.

Note that some people expect that gsub would yield to the block all the matched groups as arguments - that is not the case, you’ll always get a single argument denoting the entire regexp match.

# here name is 'Apollo 12' and number is blank
'Apollo 12'.gsub(/(\w+) (\d+)/) { |name, number| puts name, number }

Keep this in mind!

That’s all for today folks! I hope you’ll find this short article useful!