From: "@*(&SPAM&)*optonline.net" <" kboruff\""@*.*optonline.net>
Date: 2004-06-27T09:03:02+09:00
Subject: Writing UNIX 'wc' program

Hey all,

I've been spending the last week learning Ruby. Prior to that, I had 
spent some time learning Python. For various reasons, it looks like I'm 
gravitating more to Ruby.

That being said, I decided to write a small program similiar to the UNIX 
'wc' program.

Right now, it's very stripped down being that it only accepts input data 
from STDIN if not a tty and I also haven't yet implemented the command 
line arguments.

For the context of this post, I only included the logic that gets/prints 
the word count and gets/prints the length of the longest line since 
these are the ones I have questions about. Here it is:


----- Beginning of Program -----

#!/bin/env ruby

# Read input from stdin only if not a tty. The only reason I gave such a
# constraint here was just to see that I could do it. It's one of the
# first things I do in learning a new language
if not STDIN.tty?
    data = STDIN.read
end

exit if not data


# PRINT THE WORD COUNT

# I'm wondering if there's an easier way to do this. It would
# be nice of the String::count method accepted regex patterns
# and not just strings.

# As it stands, this method creates a seperate array of words
# for which I get the count of. I would've rather done this
# without the extra overhead but I guess it's no big deal: it works!
printf("Word Count: %d\n", data.split(/\s/).length)


# GET THE LENGTH OF THE LONGEST LINE

# If there's a more elegant solution than what I have below, I'm all
# ears
line_length = 0
data.split(/\n/).each do |line|
    line_length = line.length if line_length < line.length
end	

printf("Longest Line Length: %d\n", line_length)

----- End of Program -----


My question here isn't correctness as much as elegance. I'm fairly sure 
the solutions I've provided are correct (maybe); I'm just wondering if 
anyone has a better solution.

Thanks,
Keith P. Boruff