arrays - How to Delete Strings that Start with Certain Characters in Ruby

Question

I have strings of the following pattern showing up in an array:

"@SomeUselessText"

In this example, I'd like to get rid of all strings in my array that start with the character "@".

This is what I've come up with so far:

def array_purge(array)
  for array.each |item|
    item = item.gsub(/@.*/, "")
  end
end

However, this also gets rid of valid email address of the form:

"[email protected]"

...which I'd like to keep.

I'm guessing there is an elegant way of handling this. Perhaps using ".reject!"

Answer 1

The other suggested answers do not in fact purge the targeted items from the array; they merely replace the items with empty strings. More likely you want this:

def array_purge(array)
  array.reject! { |item| item.start_with?('@') }
end

>> array = ['Hello', '123', '@SomeUselessText', '[email protected]']
>> array_purge(array)
=> ["Hello", "123", "[email protected]"]