From: Belorion <belorion@...>
Date: 2005-01-08T06:51:37+09:00
Subject: Re: what's the Ruby way to do this?

Sorry to post again so soon after my last post -- my reply box lost
focus and enter sent the message instead of a newline...

Anyway...


> Admittedly, his words don't carry as much weight as yours,
> but I think they make a lot of sense.  Note where he says that
> regular expressions can replace "many lines of code", a practice
> of which he seems to approve.  Please forgive him, if not me,
> Belorian.
> 
> "If you have never worked with regular expressions before,
> they probably look anything but regular".
> 
> How true that is!  I am not as familiar with Ruby-style
> regular expressions as I would like to be, since I've done
> much more programming in Awk, which has less powerful ones.
> I see now that I could have made it shorter (and I wouldn't
> be surprised if Florian Gross could make it "yet shorter"):
> 
> def snippet(thought)
> thought.match(/(\S+(\s+|$)){0,10}/)[0]+($'>""?"...":"")
> end

I did not mean to imply regular expressions are in poor form.  They
are quite powerful, and I think Ruby would be crippled without them. 
Rather, I was of the opinion that the other solutions were more
approriate for the simplicity of the problem, and that *always* using
regular expressions can complicate matters that don't need
complicating.  One of the things I love about Ruby the most is the
simplicity of the solutions you can come up with.