What is the difference between tr and gsub?

Question

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

Answer 1

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. http://apidock.com/ruby/String/tr

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. http://apidock.com/ruby/String/gsub

Answer 2

• 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.

Answer 3

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"