From: Patrick Hurley <phurley@...>
Date: 2005-12-08T14:00:47+09:00
Subject: Re: increasing counter whithin loop?

> On 12/7/05, mental@rydia.net <mental@rydia.net> wrote:
> >
> > A lot of Ruby's clarity comes not from being able to write things
> > clearly in the "raw" language, but from being able to easily
> > customize the language for your needs.

+1

You can also try something like this:

module Enumerable
  def each_with_gathered_dups
    group = []
    each do |elem|
      if elem == group.last
        group << elem
      else
        begin
          yield group unless group.empty?
        ensure
          group = [elem]
        end
      end
    end
    yield group
  end
end

# which might work something like this
a = [1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6]
a.each_with_gathered_dups { |g| p g }

outputing

[1]
[2, 2, 2]
[3]
[4]
[5, 5]
[6, 6, 6, 6]

Notice I chose to wrap the dups as arrays, and single elements as
single element arrays, just another approach, but the lesson is don't
fight the language, grow it to your problem (and learn how to make
better method names than I do :-)

pth