Trying to remove dots with gsub

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#1

With the following code i am trying to remove certain characters, including dots. It works fine when i replace the dot with any other character to remove, but when i want to remove dots it just returns an empty string. anyone know why and how to fix it?

local pure,match = string.gsub('Hi!? This is a test.','!','')
pure,match = string.gsub(pure,'?','')
pure,match = string.gsub(pure,'.','')
print(pure)

I also noticed that for some reason when i want to make it replace dots it replaces all characters.

#2

Here ! I can’t really explain why but this will works

local pure,match = string.gsub(‘Hi!? This is a test.’,‘!’,‘’)
pure,match = string.gsub(pure,‘?’,‘’)
pure,match = string.gsub(pure,‘%.’,‘’)
print(pure)

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#3

thank you! I knew it had something to do with string formatting but i couldnt figure out what

1 Like
#4

. is a magic character, meaning a special character that does a specific thing, in this case it just matches any character. % is the escape character, so instead of matching any character it will match literally “.”. You can also shorten this by using groups.

local input = "Hi!? This is a test."
local pure  = string.gsub(input, "[%.!?]", "");
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