Gsub and sub for replacement in Ruby - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Using gsub and sub for Replacement in Ruby

📖 Scenario: Imagine you have a list of product names with inconsistent formatting. You want to clean up these names by replacing certain words or characters.

🎯 Goal: You will create a Ruby program that uses sub and gsub methods to replace parts of strings. This will help you understand how to change text in Ruby.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a string variable with a product description

Create a variable to hold the word to replace

Use sub to replace only the first occurrence of a word

Use gsub to replace all occurrences of a word

Print the results to see the changes

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Cleaning and formatting text data is common in many jobs, like preparing product descriptions for websites or fixing typos in documents.

💼 Career

Knowing how to replace text efficiently helps in roles like data cleaning, software development, and content management.

1

Create the product description string

Create a string variable called product_description with the value "Fresh apples, apples, and more apples".

Ruby

# Create the product_description string
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use double quotes to create the string exactly as shown.

2

Create the word to replace

Create a string variable called word_to_replace and set it to "apples".

Ruby

product_description = "Fresh apples, apples, and more apples"
# Create the word_to_replace string
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Remember to use double quotes for the string.

3

Use sub and gsub for replacement

Create two new variables: first_replacement that uses sub on product_description to replace the first occurrence of word_to_replace with "oranges", and all_replacements that uses gsub to replace all occurrences of word_to_replace with "oranges".

Ruby

product_description = "Fresh apples, apples, and more apples"
word_to_replace = "apples"
# Use sub and gsub to replace 'apples' with 'oranges'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use sub for the first occurrence and gsub for all occurrences.

4

Print the results

Print the variables first_replacement and all_replacements each on its own line.

Ruby

product_description = "Fresh apples, apples, and more apples"
word_to_replace = "apples"
first_replacement = product_description.sub(word_to_replace, "oranges")
all_replacements = product_description.gsub(word_to_replace, "oranges")
# Print the results
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use puts to print each result on a new line.