How to remove all non - ASCII characters from a string in Ruby - ruby

I seems to be a very simple and much needed method. I need to remove all non ASCII characters from a string. e.g © etc. See the following example.
#coding: utf-8
s = " Hello this a mixed string © that I made."
puts s.encoding
puts s.encode
output:
UTF-8
Hello this a mixed str
ing © that I made.
When I feed this to Watir, it produces following error:incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT
So my problem is that I want to get rid of all non ASCII characters before using it. I will not know which encoding the source string "s" uses.
I have been searching and experimenting for quite some time now.
If I try to use
puts s.encode('ASCII-8BIT')
It gives the error:
: "\xC2\xA9" from UTF-8 to ASCII-8BIT (Encoding::UndefinedConversionError)

You can just literally translate what you asked into a Regexp. You wrote:
I want to get rid of all non ASCII characters
We can rephrase that a little bit:
I want to substitue all characters which don't thave the ASCII property with nothing
And that's a statement that can be directly expressed in a Regexp:
s.gsub!(/\P{ASCII}/, '')
As an alternative, you could also use String#delete!:
s.delete!("^\u{0000}-\u{007F}")

Strip out the characters using regex. This example is in C# but the regex should be the same:
How can you strip non-ASCII characters from a string? (in C#)
Translating it into ruby using gsub should not be difficult.

UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding. When a character occupies one byte, its value coincides with 7-bit ASCII. So why don't you just look for bytes with a '1' in the MSB, and then remove both them and their trailers? A byte beginning with '110' will be followed by one additional byte. A byte beginning with '1110' will be followed by two. And a byte beginning with '11110' will be followed by three, the maximum supported by UTF-8.
This is all just off the top of my head. I could be wrong.

Related

Convert UTF-8 to CP1252 ruby 2.2

How to keep all characters converting from UTF-8 to CP1252 on ruby 2.2
this code:
file = 'd:/1 descrição.txt'
puts file.encode('cp1252')
Give this error:
`encode': U+0327 to WINDOWS-1252 in conversion from UTF-8 to WINDOWS-1252 (Encoding::UndefinedConversionError)
My application need to be cp1252, but I can't find any way to keep all the characters.
I can't replace this characters, because later I will use this info to read the file from file system.
puts file.encode('cp1252', undef: :replace, replace: '')
> d:/1 descricao.txt
ps: It is a ruby script not a ruby on rails application
UTF-8 covers the entire range of unicode, but CP1252 only includes a subset of them. Obviously this means that there are characters that can be encoded in UTF-8 but not in CP1252. This is the problem you are facing.
In your example it looks like the string only contains characters that should work in CP1252, but clearly it doesn’t.
The character in the error message, U+0327 is a combining character, and is not representable in CP1252. It combines with the preceding c to produce ç. ç can also be represented as a single character (U+00E7), which is representable in CP1252.
One option might be normalisation, which will convert the string into a form that is representable in CP1252.
file = 'd:/1 descrição.txt'.unicode_normalize(:nfc)
puts file.encode('cp1252')
(It appears that Stack Overflow is normalizing the string when displaying your question, which is probably why copying the code from the question and running it doesn’t produce any errors.)
This will avoid the error, but note that it is not necessarily possible to reverse the process to get the original string unless the original is in a known normalized form already.

Converting integers to UTF-8 (Korean)

I'm running Ruby 1.9.2 and trying to fix some broken UTF-8 text input where the text is literally "\\354\\203\\201\\355\\221\\234\\353\\252\\205" and change it into its correct Korean "상표명"
However after searching for a while and trying a few methods I still get out gibberish.
It's confusing as the escaped characters example on line 3 works fine
# encoding: utf-8
puts "상표명" # Target string
# Output: "상표명"
puts "\354\203\201\355\221\234\353\252\205" # Works with escaped characters like this
# Output: "상표명"
# Real input is a string
input = "\\354\\203\\201\\355\\221\\234\\353\\252\\205"
# After some manipulation got it into an array of numbers
puts [354, 203,201,355,221,234,353,252,205].pack('U*').force_encoding('UTF-8')
# Output: ŢËÉţÝêšüÍ (gibberish)
I'm sure this must have been answered somewhere but I haven't managed to find it.
This is what you want to do to get your UTF-8 Korean text:
s = "\\354\\203\\201\\355\\221\\234\\353\\252\\205"
k = s.scan(/\d+/).map { |n| n.to_i(8) }.pack("C*").force_encoding('utf-8')
# "상표명"
And this is how it works:
The input string is nice and regular so we can use scan to pull out the individual number.
Then a map with to_i(8) to convert the octal values (as noted by Henning Makholm) to integers.
Now we need to convert our list of integers to bytes so we pack('C*') to get a byte string. This string will have the BINARY encoding (AKA ASCII-8BIT).
We happen to know that the bytes really do represent UTF-8 so we can force the issue with force_encoding('utf-8').
The main thing that you were missing was your pack format; 'U' means "UTF-8 character" and would expect an array of Unicode codepoints each represented by a single integer, 'C' expects an array of bytes and that's what we had.
The \354 and so forth are octal escapes, not decimal, so you cannot just write them as 354 to get the integer values of the bytes.

Convert unicode codepoint to string character in Ruby

I have these values from a unicode database but I'm not sure how to translate them into the human readable form. What are these even called?
Here they are:
U+2B71F
U+2A52D
U+2A68F
U+2A690
U+2B72F
U+2B4F7
U+2B72B
How can I convert these to there readable symbols?
How about:
# Using pack
puts ["2B71F".hex].pack("U")
# Using chr
puts (0x2B71F).chr(Encoding::UTF_8)
In Ruby 1.9+ you can also do:
puts "\u{2B71F}"
I.e. the \u{} escape sequence can be used to decode Unicode codepoints.
The unicode symbols like U+2B71F are referred to as a codepoint.
The unicode system defines a unique codepoint for each character in a multitude of world languages, scientific symbols, currencies etc. This character set is steadily growing.
For example, U+221E is infinity.
The codepoints are hexadecimal numbers. There is always exactly one number defined per character.
There are many ways to arrange this in memory. This is known as an encoding of which the common ones are UTF-8 and UTF-16. The conversion to and fro is well defined.
Here you are most probably looking for converting the unicode codepoint to UTF-8 characters.
codepoint = "U+2B71F"
You need to extract the hex part coming after U+ and get only 2B71F. This will be the first group capture. See this.
codepoint.to_s =~ /U\+([0-9a-fA-F]{4,5}|10[0-9a-fA-F]{4})$/
And you're UTF-8 character will be:
utf_8_character = [$1.hex].pack("U")
References:
Convert Unicode codepoints to UTF-8 characters with Module#const_missing.
Tim Bray on the goodness of unicode.
Joel Spolsky - The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).
Dissecting the Unicode regular expression

Remove all but some special characters

I am trying to come up with a regex to remove all special characters except some. For example, I have a string:
str = "subscripción gustaría♥"
I want the output to be "subscripción gustaría".
The way I tried to do is, match anything which is not an ascii character (00 - 7F) and not special character I want and replace it with blank.
str.gsub(/(=?[^\x00-\x7F])(=?^\xC3\xB3)(=?^\xC3\xA1)/,'')
This doesn't work. The last special character is not removed.
Can someone help? (This is ruby 1.8)
Update: I am trying to make the question a little more clear. The string is utf-8 encoded. And I am trying to whitelist the ascii characters plus ó and í and blacklist everything else.
Oniguruma has support for all the characters you care about without having to deal with codepoints. You can just add the unicode characters inside the character class you're whitelisting, followed by the 'u' option.
ruby-1.8.7-p248 > str = "subscripción gustaría♥"
=> "subscripci\303\263n gustar\303\255a\342\231\245"
ruby-1.8.7-p248 > puts str.gsub(/[^a-zA-Z\sáéíóúÁÉÍÓÚ]/u,'')
subscripción gustaría
=> nil
str.split('').find_all {|c| (0x00..0x7f).include? c.ord }.join('')
The question is a bit vague. There is not a word about encoding of the string. Also, you want to white-list characters or black list? Which ones?
But you get the idea, decide what you want, and then use proper ranges as colleagues here already proposed. Some examples:
if str = "subscripción gustaría♥" is utf-8
then you can blacklist all char above the range (excl. whitespaces):
str.gsub(/[^\x{0021}-\x{017E}\s]/,'')
if string is in ISO-8859-1 codepage you can try to match all quirky characters like the "heart" from the beginning of ASCII range:
str.gsub(/[\x01-\x1F]/,'')
The problem is here with regex, has nothing to do with Ruby. You probably will need to experiment more.
It is not completely clear which characters you want to keep and which you want to delete. The example string's character is some Unicode character that, in my browser, displays as a heart symbol. But it seems you are dealing with 8-bit ASCII characters (since you are using ruby 1.8 and your regular expressions point that way).
Nonetheless, you should be able to do it in one of two ways; either specify the characters you want to keep or, alternatively, specify the characters you want to delete. For example, the following specifies that all characters 0x00-0x7F and 0xC0-0xF6 should be kept (remove everything that is not in that group):
puts str.gsub(/[^\x00-\x7F\xC0-\xF6]/,'')
This next example specifies that characters 0xA1 and 0xC3 should be deleted.
puts str.gsub(/[\xA1\xC3]/,'')
I ended up doing this: str.gsub(/[^\x00-\x7FÁáÉéÍíÑñÓóÚúÜü]/,''). It doesn't work on my mac but works on linux.

Getting a meaning of the string

I have the following string "\u3048\u3075\u3057\u3093". I got the string
from a web page as part of returned data in JSONP.
What is that? It looks like UTF8, but then should it look like "U+3048U+3075U+3057U+3093"?
What's the meaning of the backslashes (\)?
How can I convert it to a human-readable form?
I'm looking to a solution with Ruby, but any explanation of what's going on here is appreciated.
The U+3048 syntax is normally used to represent the Unicode code point of a character. Such code point is fixed and does not depend on the encoding (UTF-8, UTF-32...).
A JSON string is composed of Unicode characters except double quote, backslash and those in the U+0000 to U+001F range (control characters). Characters can be represented with a escape sequence starting with \u and followed by 4 hexadecimal digits that represent the Unicode code point of the character. This is the JavaScript syntax (JSON is a subset of it). In JavaScript, the backslash is used as escape char.
It is Unicode, but not in UTF-8, it is in UTF-16. You might ignore surrogate pairs and deem it as 4-digit hexadecimal code points of a Unicode code character.
Using Ruby 1.9:
require 'json'
puts JSON.parse("[\"\\u4e00\",\"\\u4e8c\"]")
Prints:
一
二
Unicode characters in JSON are escaped as backslash u followed by four hex digits. See the string production on json.org.
Any JSON parser will convert it to the correct representation for your platform (if it doesn't, then by definition it is not a JSON parser)

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