What is the difference between tr and gsub?

I was reading the Ruby documentation and got confused with the difference between gsub and tr. What is the difference between the two?

3 Answers

Use tr when you want to replace (translate) single characters.

tr matches on single characters (not via a regular expression), therefore the characters don't need to occur in the same order in the first string argument. When a character is found, it is replaced with the character that is found at the same index in the second string argument:

'abcde'.tr('bda', '123') #=> "31c2e" 'abcde'.tr('bcd', '123') #=> "a123e" 

Use gsub when you need to use a regular expression or when you want to replace longer substrings:

'abcde'.gsub(/bda/, '123') #=> "abcde" 'abcde'.gsub(/b.d/, '123') #=> "a123e" 

• tr can only replace a single character with a single fixed character (although you can put multiple matches of this sort in a single tr call) but is fast.
• gsub can match complicated patterns using regex, and replace with a complicated computation result, but is slower than tr.

tr returns a copy of str with the characters in from_str replaced by the corresponding characters in to_str. If to_str is shorter than from_str, it is padded with its last character in order to maintain the correspondence.

gsub returns a copy of str with the all occurrences of pattern substituted for the second argument. The pattern is typically a Regexp; if given as a String, any regular expression metacharacters it contains will be interpreted literally, e.g. \d will match a backlash followed by d, instead of a digit.