Using gsub to replace a particular character with a newline (Ruby, Rails console)
Annoying problem. I am trying to replace all semicolon characters in my Model's description field with newline characters (\n). The database is sqlite. The field is of type text.
If I do it manually at the rails console (manually typing the description for a single record using \n for line breaks), the rails console automatically escapes the \n, and the description field becomes filled with \\n.
If I do it programmatically using gsub, I get the following situation:
>> s = Sample.find(:first)
=> ...details of record ...
>> s.description.gsub!(/;/,"\n")
=> ...success - it all looks good, new lines in the returned value are represented by \n...
>> s.save
=> true
>> reload!
Reloading
=> true
>> s = Sample.find(:first)
=> ...details of record ...
>> s.description
=> ... the description field still has semicolons in it rather than newline characters ...
AHHHHHH!!!!!!!
Answer
s.description returns a copy of the description so gsub! will only modify the copy and return the modified copy.
Try this:
s.description = s.description.gsub(/;/,"\n")