From: Mark Woodward <see@...>
Date: 2006-01-11T20:43:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Finding a sentence (more than one word & punctuation (, . ;))in a string?

Hi Ross,

Ross Bamford wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Jan 2006 10:52:08 -0000, Mark Woodward <see@signature.com>  
> wrote:

> I'm not sure what you're trying to do here, 

makes 2 of us ;-)

but I think split returns
> an  array already, operated on by reject in this case, which returns the 
> new  array. So with the Erik's code:
> 
>     a = s.split(/\s*<[^<>]*>\s*/).reject{|x| x.empty?}
>     p a       
>     # => ["message", "the message to echo.", ... etc ... ]

Exactly what I was trying to do. I thought it had to be an array but 
couldn't figure out how to print it like ["","",""] like the OP wanted.
p a - now thats embarrassing! 2 letters and it works. Compare that to my 
gibberish :-(. We all have to start somewhere I guess!

> 
> I guess an alternative similar to your approach above might be:
> 
>     b = foo.split(/\s*<[^<>]*>\s*/).inject([]) { |ary,x| if x.empty? 
> then ary  else ary << x end }
>     p b
>     # => ["message", "the message to echo.", ... etc ... ]
> 
> Note the 'p' method, which prints out using 'inspect'. Alternatively, 
> you  could have done:
> 
>     puts b.inspect
>     print "{b.inspect}\n"

steady on! ;-)

> 
> and so on. Another nitpick about your example, is that in most Ruby 
> I've  seen people tend to prefer using unless rather than !negating the  
> condition to if. So where you have:
> 
>     if x != ""
> 
> I'd tend to use:
> 
>     unless x == ""
> 
> or (more likely):
> 
>     unless x.empty?

Nitpick away! I appreciate it. Its been a good little exercise re p, 
puts, print and chaining methods etc. I've been reading the pickaxe 
book, but readings not good enough. I need to write some code. If I can 
make a fool of myself here but learn something at the same time then 
thats great!

> 
> Cheers,
> 

thanks,

--
Mark