From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2006-04-27T21:51:48+09:00
Subject: Re: [SUMMARY] Text Munger (#76)

On Apr 27, 2006, at 7:41 AM, dblack@wobblini.net wrote:

> Hi --
>
> On Thu, 27 Apr 2006, Ruby Quiz wrote:
>
>> It's important to remember that this is the Regular Expression  
>> definition of
>> "words", including digit characters and the underscore.  That's  
>> not a perfect
>> match for the quiz task, but was a popular choice nonetheless.
>>
>> Now, I did say *all* words are scrambled and that is what I  
>> meant.  A run of
>> four or more punctuation characters is a word, and the middle  
>> punctuation would
>> be scrambled.  In practice, this is rare enough to be a minor issue.
>
> "Are you kiddin'?!" he exclaimed :-)
>
> I thought some of the solutions addressed these problems, didn't they,
> with [^\W\d_] and such?

I meant that scrambling long runs of punctuation didn't really seem  
to be a problem in actual usage.

Yes, some did correctly find the right characters to scramble.   
Worse, I seem to have completely overlooked this gem I was just  
informed about off-list:

On Apr 27, 2006, at 7:36 AM, Stefano Taschini wrote:
> On 27/04/06, Ruby Quiz <james@grayproductions.net> wrote:
>>
>> We probably can't fix all the solutions like this though.  It  
>> depends on how
>> they separated the word into letters.
>>
>> The downside of this is that it makes it harder to recognize word  
>> characters,
>> without the digits and underscores.  Filtering out punctuation is  
>> a lot harder
>> when we expand to such a vast definition of characters.   I'm not  
>> aware of a
>> good Ruby solution for that issue yet.  (Please enlighten me if  
>> you are!)
>
> Actually, my solution [1] does exactly that, with the regexp
> String::Letter acting on a string that has been put into D-normal
> form.
>
>
> Ciao
> Stefano
>
>
> [1] http://www.ruby-talk.org/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/189926

My apologies to those who didn't receive the proper credit.  :(

James Edward Gray II