Improved String whitespace utilities

[pbhogan]

These are some whitespace utilities that I use all the time extracted from another codebase which could replace trim_whitespace. They could use better names perhaps. Unfortunately, strip has a different meaning in Ruby which I feel is actually a poor choice. In any event, these versions do a better job of dealing with whitespace, including unicode whitespace.

class String

  def trim_whitespace
    gsub(/^[\p{Z}\s]+/, "").gsub(/[\p{Z}\s]+$/, "").gsub(/[\p{Z}\s]+/, " ")
  end


  def trim_whitespace!
    gsub! /^[\p{Z}\s]+/, ""
    gsub! /[\p{Z}\s]+$/, ""
    gsub! /[\p{Z}\s]+/, " "
    self
  end


  def trim_html_whitespace
    # maybe a better way to implement this?
    decode_entities.trim_whitespace.encode_entities
  end


  def strip_whitespace
    gsub /[\p{Z}\s]+/, ""
  end


  def strip_whitespace!
    gsub! /[\p{Z}\s]+/, ""
  end

end

[gurgeous]

Neat, I like those. A few thoughts:

• I'd probably rename trim_whitespace to squish_more since it is very similar to squish. One of my favorite helpers, btw.
• squish_more can just be dup.squish_more!
• I might shy away from trim_html_whitespace unless you have a real specific use case... Is the goal to handle & nbsp;, & #32; etc? Enterprising users can probably call those three methods themselves without too much trouble.
• Personally I'd find it a little confusing that strip_whitespace looks like strip, but does something completely different. Maybe call it remove_whitespace? Oh, and remove_whitespace can call the bang version :)
• Actually, we could probably use a strip_more that works like strip (but uses \p{Z}).

(edited for typos and also the & ... was ironically getting unescaped)