From: Kev Jackson <kevin.jackson@...>
Date: 2005-10-03T17:58:16+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby gsub! problem

>
>
>
>filename.to_s.gsub!(/\n/, '') would replace all newlines in the
>filename. That is certainly not what you want. You could do
>
>string = File.read(filename).gsub(/\n/, '')
>
>to get the content of the file without newlines
>
>and
>
>lines = File.read(filename).gsub(/\n/, '').split(";", -1)
>
>to get what you want. The snippet from James is for processing each
>line of a file after each other and may be a less memory intensive way
>to achieve your goal.
>
>hope to help,
>  
>
Here's what I ended up with - love blocks, without them there'd be a lot 
more resource handling...

File.open("sections.sql", "w") do |output|
File.open("TBLSECTION.dat","r") do |input|
  lines=0
# here I was trying to remove the \n
  input.to_s.gsub!(/\n/, '')
# didn't work so moved into munge_fields
  input.each(";") do |line|
    munge_fields line
    munge_data(line, lines+1)
    p line
    output << line << "\n"
    lines+=1
  end
  p "Total Lines in file : " + lines.to_s
end
end

both munge_fields and munge_data do the sub! thing to bring the data 
back to the format I want, and although I considered splitting to get an 
array of strings then creating a builder to rebuild my output, for now 
it works fine with simple regexps

Kev