I have been in the habit of using String#chomp when interactively requesting input from people. I am considering using String#strip instead. It does more than chomp, in that it will remove leading whitespace, trailing whitespace and still the $/ which is to say the record separator. I think that it is more suitable for interactive input, unless you are counting on leading whitespace from someone for some reason.

The statement that we always say when talking about chomp and to_i or to_f is that to_i and to_f does the same thing as chomp, and this is almost true. But to_i and to_f actually work more like strip.

Consider this:

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>> gets.strip
   98
=> "98"
>> gets.to_i
   98
=> 98

As you can see, in reality to_i strips the leading whitespace, and by definition any trailing whitespace (though in reality all string content that isn’t part of the first recognizable ‘numeric-like’ string) including the record separator.

So, I am trading in my habitual String#chomp use for the cleaner String#strip use, and where appropriate String#strip! and I believe I will still have fun with Ruby!

Let me know what you think about this small movement?