From: Daniel Schierbeck <daniel.schierbeck@...>
Date: 2006-07-06T23:53:47+09:00
Subject: Re: A newbie would like some code criticism, please...

Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality wrote:
> first = true
> list.each do |item|
>     if first
>         # do something special for the first case
> 
>         first = false
>     else
>         # do something else for every other item
>     end
> end
> 
>     Is there a better way to do this?  Perhaps some way to simply iterate 
> over every element other than the first one?  Something that avoid a check 
> every iteration?

There are several ways of doing this:

   list.each_with_index do |item, i|
     if i == 0
       # first item
     else
       # not the first item
     end
   end

Though it's not very pretty


   # returns the first item and removes it
   # from the array
   list.shift

   list.each do |item|
     # the rest of the items
   end

Note that this alters `list'! The following won't:

   # returns the first item, keeps it in
   # the array
   list.first

   ary[1...ary.length].each do |item|
     # all but the first item
   end

I'm sure there are even more ways of doing it.


Cheers,
Daniel