Ruby Chop vs Chomp

When you receive user input from textareas or console input you may get some newline characters. One way to remove newline characters is the String#chop method, it will remove any trailing newline or carriage return characters “\r\n”. But it’s tricky. Because here it works like it’s suppose to.

full_name = "My Name is Ravikanth\r\n" 

full_name.chop! # => "My Name is Ravikanth"

Now if you run chop and there are no newline characters.

puts full_name    #=> "My Name is Ravikanth"

full_name.chop!  #=> "My Name is Ravikant"

Disaster Strikes!

That’s why there is chomp.

puts full_name       #=> "My Name is Ravikanth\r\n"

full_name.chomp!  #=> "My Name is Ravikanth"
full_name.chomp!  #=> "My Name is Ravikanth"

So chomp is our recommended way of removing trailing newline characters.