Ruby Class for creating a list of normalized strings

cleaned_list.rb

require 'set'

class CleanedList
  def initialize
    @data = SortedSet.new
  end

  def to_a
    @data.to_a
  end

  def to_set
    @data
  end

  def <<(item)
    processed = item.to_s.downcase.strip.gsub(/\s{2,}/, '')
    @data << processed unless processed.nil? || processed == ""
  end
end