I was just paying taxes 😅. One of the steps involved was copying and pasting a few long reference numbers from a PDF into my banking app. The thing is, when copied, the reference number would contain extra spaces, after each character, making it invalid where I needed to paste it.

Now there are myriad of different solutions for this I’m sure, but as a programmer, let’s take a look at how to speedily create a makeshift tool in Ruby to do this.

irb
space_eater = ->(text) { text.gsub(' ', '') }

We launched into the interactive shell, and defined a lambda we can call on strings we want to sanitize. Like so:

space_eater.call('2 3 9 2 9 9 A 8 2 8 0 0 0 1')
=> "239299A8280001"

And we’re done. ❤️ Ruby.