From: Mat Schaffer <schapht@...>
Date: 2006-07-20T06:17:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Parsing-Newbie question

On Jul 19, 2006, at 4:47 PM, Ricardo Furgeson wrote:
> Hello everybody,
>
> Ruby is my first prgramming lenguage.  I know it's a simple  
> question so
> I hope someone can help me out.  I have a file that i need to read,
> here's my code so far:
>
> class Parser
>
>  File.open("Data") do |file|
>   while line = file.gets
>
>
>
>
>    end
>   end
>
> end
>
> somewhere in my file there is a table of strings like this:
>
> "Hello" = "hi miguel"
> "wrong" = "this is not the right anser"
> "correct asnwer" = "this is the right asnwer"
> "for what" = "tell me what you need it for"
>
> My problem is this:
> I want o search for this table, and read in such a way so that when I
> call for a value(example, hello I can get its value, which is 'hi
> miguel').
>
> I know it's a straigt forward process.  I'm not sure how to search for
> the table, and wheather to use a hash or arrays.  Can anyone help me
> out?
>
> Thank you so much.
>
>
> Ricardo

I find that each_line is nicer to work with than .gets for these  
purposes.  It would look like this:

File.open("Data") do |file|
   file.each_line do |line|
     #here pull the line appart (regular expressions are a good  
choice, or maybe using the String#split function.  Check 'ri' for that)
     #Use the pulled apart piece to create a data structure		
   end
end

I'll leave the middle parts to you.  Be warned that the "line"  
variable will still have a new line ("\n") at the end.  A mistake  
which caught me when I was first learning Ruby.

Good luck!
Mat