From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2005-01-08T21:06:26+09:00
Subject: Re: what's the Ruby way to do this?

William James wrote:

> "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

Let's try then:

def snippet(thought)
   result = thought.clone
   result[/^(?:\S*\s+){9}\S*(.+)$/, 1] = "..."
ensure
   return result
end

def snippet(thought)
   thought.sub(/^((?:\S*\s+){9}\S*)(.+)$/, '\1...')
end

But actually I still prefer the solution I gave earlier. Regexps are 
harder to understand than the equivalent code and gain you little in 
this case. (Even if you know them, there's still some advanced trickery 
involved in our pieces of code.)