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> Is there a simple way to remove all but the legal chars from a string.  where the legal chars are for example: a-z A-Z 0-9
> So everything should be removed from the string but these characters.
> "exam@p  Le3| --> "exampLe"
>
> I don't know very much about regular expressions, so I don't know if it'sossible with sub or gsub.  My first Idea was to loop over the string and check every character but I wondered if there is something more simple or better.


 	str="exam@p  L_e3|þÁ¥¹"
 	puts str.gsub(/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/, "")
 	# yields:
 	#	exampLe3


a bit shorter would be

 	puts str.gsub(/\W/, "")
 	# but "word"-characters (\w) and "non-word"-characters (\W) also
 	# contain the' _', so this would yield:
 	#	exampL_e3


Benedikt


   ALLIANCE, n.  In international politics, the union of two thieves who
     have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that
     they cannot separately plunder a third.
 			(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary)
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