Why does strip not remove the leading whitespace?

Question

I tried to `strip` the leading whitespace of a string: ``` " Bagsværd".strip # => " Bagsværd" ``` I expect it to return `"Bagsværd"` instead.

Accepted Answer

Where did the string `" Bagsværd"` come from?

It’s likely that the space character at the start of the string is not a “normal” space, but a non-breaking space (U+00A0):

```
2.0.0p353 :001 > " Bagsværd".strip
 => "Bagsværd" 
2.0.0p353 :002 > "\u00a0Bagsværd".strip
 => " Bagsværd" 
```

You could remove it with `gsub` rather than `strip`:

```
2.0.0p353 :003 > "\u00a0Bagsværd".gsub(/\A\p{Space}*/, '')
 => "Bagsværd" 
```

This uses the `\A` anchor, and the `\p{Space}` character property to emulate `lstrip`. To strip both leading and trailing whitespace, use:

```
2.0.0p353 :007 > "\u00a0Bagsværd\u00a0".gsub(/\A\p{Space}*|\p{Space}*\z/, '')
 => "Bagsværd" 
```

Solution