Ruby: Remove whitespace chars at the beginning of a string

> ' string '.lstrip.chop
=> "string"

Strips both white spaces...

String#lstrip (or String#lstrip!) is what you're after.

desired_output = example_array.map(&:lstrip)

More comments about your code:

delete_if {|x| x == ""} can be replaced with delete_if(&:empty?)
Except you want reject! because delete_if will only return a different array, rather than modify the existing one.
words.each {|e| e.lstrip!} can be replaced with words.each(&:lstrip!)
delete("\r") should be redundant if you're reading a windows-style text document on a Windows machine, or a Unix-style document on a Unix machine
split(",") can be replaced with split(", ") or split(/, */) (or /, ?/ if there should be at most one space)

So now it looks like:

words = params[:word].gsub("\n", ",").split(/, ?/)
words.reject!(&:empty?)
words.each(&:lstrip!)

I'd be able to give more advice if you had the sample text available.

Edit: Ok, here goes:

temp_array = text.split("\n").map do |line|
  fields = line.split(/, */)
  non_empty_fields = fields.reject(&:empty?)
end
temp_array.flatten(1)

The methods used are String#split, Enumerable#map, Enumerable#reject and Array#flatten.

Ruby also has libraries for parsing comma seperated files, but I think they're a little different between 1.8 and 1.9.

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