[ruby] Replace words in a string - Ruby

If you're dealing with natural language text and need to replace a word, not just part of a string, you have to add a pinch of regular expressions to your gsub as a plain text substitution can lead to disastrous results:

'mislocated cat, vindicating'.gsub('cat', 'dog')
=> "mislodoged dog, vindidoging"

Regular expressions have word boundaries, such as \b which matches start or end of a word. Thus,

'mislocated cat, vindicating'.gsub(/\bcat\b/, 'dog')
=> "mislocated dog, vindicating"

In Ruby, unlike some other languages like Javascript, word boundaries are UTF-8-compatible, so you can use it for languages with non-Latin or extended Latin alphabets:

'???? ? ??????, ??? ??????'.gsub(/\b????\b/, '?????')
=> "????? ? ??????, ??? ??????"