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

2.19. Trimming Whitespace from a String

The strip method removes whitespace from the beginning and end of a string. Its counterpart strip! modifies the receiver in place.

str1 = "\t  \nabc  \t\n"
str2 = str1.strip         # "abc"
str3 = str1.strip!        # "abc"
# str1 is now "abc" also

Whitespace, of course, consists mostly of blanks, tabs, and end-of-line characters.

If we want to remove whitespace only from the beginning or end of a string, we can use the lstrip and rstrip methods:

str = "  abc  "
s2 = str.lstrip       # "abc  "
s3 = str.rstrip       # "  abc"

There are in-place variants rstrip! and lstrip! also.