From: Bob Showalter <bob_showalter@...>
Date: 2005-10-18T00:15:39+09:00
Subject: Re: [QUIZ] Lost Cities (#51)

I've found another glitch that affects the automation of players with 
Daniel's harness.

In James' dumb_player.rb, the following line captures the cards in the 
players hand:

  if @plays.nil? and @data =~ /Hand: (.+?)\s*$/

The regex captures up to the end of the line containing "Hand:". When 
you play this in the client-server mode, each line passed to show() end 
with a newline (since :show is delegated to :puts), and so the regex works.

When you play this under Daniel's harness, the lines passed to show() 
don't have newlines added, since each player directly calls the 
opponent's show(). The last card is immediately followed by the next 
line starting with "Score:", and so the regex captures extraneous 
"cards" (and the eighth card is incorrectly parsed as "8VScore:", for 
example).

One way to resolve this is to change the dumb_player.rb line:

   @data << game_data

To:

   @data << game_data.chomp << "\n"

That way, you get the same data when you play through the client-server 
mode or through the harness.

I wonder how this would best be handled inside lost_cities.rb or the 
harness itself?