rubyregexstringinteger

Elegant way to cut the leading 0's in a String of numbers?

A number comes in as a string, such as "000105", and I'm trying to find a good way to ignore the leading zeroes. A RegEx comes to mind, but sometimes those can get hard to read. What I do currently is:

stack = "000105"               # => "000105"
overflow = stack.to_i.to_s     # => "105"

Is there some easier/elegant way to do this? It feels clunky to convert this string to an integer and back to string.

Solution

  • I would use String#sub:

    overflow = stack.sub(/^0+/, '')

    or just String#sub! if a want to change stack:

    stack.sub!(/^0+/, '')

    In this sub is better than gsub, because it needs to match only once.