Ruby function to remove all white spaces?

To remove whitespace on both sides:

Kind of like php's trim()

"   Hello  ".strip

To remove all spaces:

"   He    llo  ".gsub(/ /, "")

To remove all whitespace:

"   He\tllo  ".gsub(/\s/, "")

A lot of suggestions work here, but when I read your question and the specific line saying "removing all the whitespace", what came to my mind was this:

" a b c " => "abc"

And if that is really what is required, you can do this simple operation

wide_string = " a b c "

narrow_string = wide_string.delete(" ")

# you can pass all the different kinds 
# of whitespaces that you want to remove

puts narrow_string # => "abc"

I was trying to do this as I wanted to use a records "title" as an id in the view but the titles had spaces.

a solution is:

record.value.delete(' ') # Foo Bar -> FooBar

I'm a bit late to the game, but I remove trailing and leading whitespaces by using strip!. If you have an array, such as I did, I needed to iterate through the array and save it after the instance ended. The ! took care of this. This removed all whitespaces at the end or the beginning, not just the first leading or the last trailing.

For example:

array = ["hello ","   Melanie", "is", " new ", "to  ", " programming"]
array.each do |i|
  i.strip!
end

This would output to: ["hello","Melanie", "is", "new ", "to", "programming"]. I further explored/shared this in a video I made to highlight this code for similar question I had.

I'm newer to programming and using strip did not work as it didn't save it to the array after the loop ended.