Ruby - String chop vs chomp

Introduction

You can remove the newline character using either chop or chomp.

In most cases, chomp is preferable because it won't remove the final character unless it is the record separator which is usually a newline, whereas chop will remove the last character no matter what it is.

Here are some examples:

Demo

# NOTE: s1 includes a carriage return and linefeed 
s1 = "Hello world # from   w  w  w  .j ava  2  s . co m
" 
s2 = "Hello world" 

puts s1.chop    # returns "Hello world" 
puts s1.chomp   # returns "Hello world" 
puts s2.chop    # returns "Hello worl" - note the missing 'd'! 
puts s2.chomp   # returns "Hello world"

Result

The chomp method also lets you specify a character or string to use as the separator:

Demo

s2 = "Hello world" 
puts s2.chomp('rld')       # returns "Hello wo"

Result

Related Topic

• String Methods
• String Replace by Regular Expression
• Iteration with a regular expression
• String match method
• Splitting Strings into Arrays
• User-Defined String Delimiters
• String Concatenation
• String methods altering itself
• String Indexing
• Apply String method on string value
• String chop and chomp
• String printf Format

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