From: Dan Schmidt <dfan@...>
Date: 2001-05-24T01:41:24+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:15600] multisend?

I frequently find myself wanting to take, say, the five matches
returned by a regular expression, and call to_i (or hex, or whatever)
on some of them, e.g.;

  str =~ /^(\d+) (\w+) (\d+) (\d+) (\w+)/
  id, name, height, weight, potato = $~[1..5]
  id = id.to_i
  height = height.to_i
  weight = weight.to_i

which always feels kind of clunky (maybe partially because you don't
have to perform these conversions in perl).  I got sick of all that
typing and now instead use the following code:

  str =~ /^(\d+) (\w+) (\d+) (\d+) (\w+)/
  id, name, height, weight, potato = $~[1..5].multisend (:to_i, nil, :to_i, :to_i, nil)

where multisend is defined thus:

  # naive implementation
  class Enumerable
    def multisend (*arr)
      i = -1
      self.map { |x|
        i += 1
        arr[i] ? x.__send__ (arr[i]) : x
      }
    end
  end

Am I reimplementing a wheel that already exists?  Can this be implemented
(or designed) better?  Is this a useful enough concept to consider putting
something like it in the core library?  Is it a monstrosity of codesize
optimization, creating ugly and unreadable code?

-- 
http://www.dfan.org