The Ruby Way: Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming, Second Edition

2.18. Removing Trailing Newlines and Other Characters

Often we want to remove extraneous characters from the end of a string. The prime example is a newline on a string read from input.

The chop method removes the last character of the string (typically a trailing newline character). If the character before the newline is a carriage return (\r), it will be removed also. The reason for this behavior is the discrepancy between different systems’ conceptions of what a newline is. On some systems such as UNIX, the newline character is represented internally as a linefeed (\n). On others such as DOS and Windows, it is stored as a carriage return followed by a linefeed (\r\n).

str = gets.chop # Read string, remove newline s2 = "Some string\n" # "Some ...