Shorter way to remove non-characters than gsub(/\d|\W/, "")

Question

my_string = 'Here's the #: 49848! - but will dashes, commas & stars (*) show?'

puts src.gsub(/\d|\W/, "")

i.e. can I remove the or ("|").

Here's how I got here, can I get shorter?

src =  "Here's the #: 49848! - but will dashes, commas & stars (*) show?"
puts "A) - " + src
puts "B) - " + src.gsub(/\d\s?/, "")
puts "C) - " + src.gsub(/\W\s?/, "")
puts "D) - " + src.gsub(/\d|\W\s?/, "")
puts "E) - " + src.gsub(/\d|\W/, "")
puts "F) - " + src

A) - Here's the #: 49848! - but will dashes, commas & stars (*) show?
B) - Here's the #: ! - but will dashes, commas & stars (*) show?
C) - Heresthe49848butwilldashescommasstarsshow
D) - Heresthebutwilldashescommasstarsshow
E) - Heresthebutwilldashescommasstarsshow
F) - Here's the #: 49848! - but will dashes, commas & stars (*) show?

n.d. D) and E) are what I want for output. Just characters.

Answer 1

my_string = "Here's the #: 49848! - but will dashes, commas & stars (*) show?"
p my_string.delete('^a-zA-Z')
#=>"Heresthebutwilldashescommasstarsshow"

Answer 2

I have this one

src.gsub(/[^a-z]/i, "")

also not shorter, but better to read in my opinion.

The i modifier makes the regex case independent, so that a-z matches also A-Z. A small difference is that this regex will also replace _ which is not replaced by yours.

Answer 3

If you want to keep also unicode letters, use this one:

/\PL/

This matches all non letter character.