Extracting 'words' in the commonly-understood sense of the word

A function I use a lot in my projects.

Author: Sprachprofi

lib/core/facets/string/words.rb

@@ -7,6 +7,18 @@ class String
   def words
     self.split(/\s+/)
   end
-
+  
+  # Returns an array of words in the commonly-understood sense (not including punctuation).
+  # This takes into account international punctuation characters as well as English ones.
+  # 
+  #     'Slowly, grudgingly he said: "This has to stop."'.words
+  #      => ["Slowly", "grudgingly", "he", "said", "This", "has", "to", "stop"]
+  def words_without_punctuation
+    s = self.dup
+    s.gsub!(/[.?¿¡…!,:：;"。？！、‘“”〈〉《》，\/\[\]]/, ' ')
+    s.gsub!('- ', ' ')
+    s.squeeze!(" ")
+    s.strip.split(" ")
+  end  
 end