From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2004-09-19T07:04:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Method improvement request .--

On Sep 18, 2004, at 4:29 PM, Charles Hixson wrote:

> I'm sure there must be a more idiomatic+efficient way to do this, but 
> I can't figure it out.  Any suggestions?
> Also, I'm not sure all of the tests are necessary.  Many of them were 
> added to avoid "Nil class does not implement..." messages.  Is there a 
> better approach?

I'll probably get in trouble for this around here, but I came from 
Perl...  <laughs>

> # parse1 separates a chunk into the non-word stuff before it, the word 
> stuff, and the non-word stuff after it
> #    word stuff is letters, digits, hyphens, and periods
>    def    parse1(chunk)
>        pb    =    /^([^-A-Za-z0-9]*)/
>        pe    =    /([^-A-Za-z0-9]*)$/
>        mtch    =    pb.match(chunk)
>        a    =    mtch[0]
>        mtch    =    pe.match(mtch.post_match)
>        b    =    mtch.pre_match
>        c    =    mtch[0]
>        #print    " parse1:a  #{a.inspect} "            if    a    and  
>  a.length > 0
>        yield    a            if    a    and    a.length > 0
>        #print    " parse1:b #{b.inspect} "            if    b    and   
> b.length > 0
>        yield    b            if    b    and    b.length > 0
>        #print    " parse1:c #{c.inspect} "            if    c    and   
> c.length > 0
>        yield    c            if    c    and    c .length > 0
>    end

What about something like:

def parse1(chunk)
	if chunk =~ / ^([^-A-Za-z0-9]*) # pre-match
			   (.*) # middle
			   ([^-A-Za-z0-9]*)$ # post-match
			  /x
		a, b, c = $1, $2, $3
	end
end

Does that give you some ideas?

James Edward Gray II