Farsi regular expressions with Ruby

Question

I don't know much about Ruby, but I have this line of code that I would like to know what it exactly does:

newline.gsub!(/\s+(های)\s+/,'‌\1 ')

I appreciate any help on this.

Answer 1

The regular expression matches if a string contains the persian phrase with one or more whitespace characters around it (both at the front and back).

Then it replaces it with the string \\1 . The \\1 refers to the first matched element. So, it removes all the whitespace around the string and adds one space after the element.

Example

I am taking the value test instead of the Parsi phrase, because unicode wasn't working out.

newline = "    test   "
=> "    test   "
newline.gsub!(/\s+(test)\s+/,'\1 ') 
=> "test "

Answer 2

The documentation says:

gsub!(pattern, replacement) → str or nil

So your expression would return the substituted string if it matched the pattern, else return nil . (Essentially remove all the whitespaces before the farsi string and replace the ones following it with a single whitespace.)