From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2005-08-26T06:41:23+09:00
Subject: Re: [SUMMARY] Sodoku Solver (#43)

On Aug 25, 2005, at 4:10 PM, Adam Shelly wrote:

> On 8/25/05, Ruby Quiz <james@grayproductions.net> wrote:
>
>> I believe Adam Shelly's parse routine could benefit from similar  
>> simplifications
>> if you want to try your own hand at a little refactoring.
>>
>
> Ok, I admit I'm a ruby newbie.  But I'm trying to learn the Ruby Way.
> How's this?

<laughs>  No worries there!

[snip old code]

> def ParseBoard(file)
>     boardlist,size = [ ],0
>     file.each do |line|
>         if line.delete!('^0-9A-Za-z_+') =~ /\++/

Beware the bang methods (ending in !) in Ruby.  Obviously it's fine  
to use them, but it's almost never a good idea to chain them.  Most  
of them return nil when they don't make a change and nil doesn't  
support very many calls, like the =~ operator you use here.  Feed it  
the wrong line and the code will crash.

In this case, you should be able to just drop the !, as delete()  
returns a copy of the String when nothing changes.

>             @@boxcols= line.length-1
>         else
>             boardlist += line.split(//).collect{|n| n.hex }
>             size = line.length
>         end
>         p line
>     end
>     boardlist,size
> end

It's definitely looking more Rubyish, I would say.  Have a look at  
how the other solutions parsed the input, if you want to compare.

James Edward Gray II