Back to my script, since I wanted to find the number of occurrences white space showed up in a given string I had to come up with a way to count white space. My first thought was to do some regular expression matching. Well after a little thought and a lot of reading, I found a this:


answer = params[:string].scan(/(\s)/)
puts answer.size

Here’s a little breakdown of whats happening for those that don’t know.

GIVEN: params is a hash with the values that were posted via a form.
Line 1: we are running the scan method on params[:string] which the value is a string. Then we pass scan method a regular expression that looks for any white space. Then the value of that is assigned to the local answer variable.
Line 2: we print the answer’s size.