Stripping dollar signs and commas from a string

It is moments like these that you realise why it is you love Ruby so much…

Today was one of those moments with the String class’s :delete method.

I have used this method many, many times in the past.. and this is nothing new for me… but it was one of those moments where I just went “Gee, I love coding in Ruby…” and I wanted to share :)

If you ever need to convert, say $12,345.12 into a single float number like 12345.12 a Ruby newbie, might do something like this:

``` {.ruby lang=”ruby” data-caption=”how not to do it”} “$12,345.12”.gsub(“$”,’’).gsub(“,”,’’) #=> “12345.12”

But hark! Look into the [string
class](http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/String.html) and you shall find
the `:delete` method, which lets you do this:

``` {.ruby lang="ruby" data-caption="how not to do it"}
"$12,345.12".delete("$,") #=> "12345.12"

Ahhh… pure Ruby bliss.

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