From: David Vallner <david@...>
Date: 2006-08-18T08:00:27+09:00
Subject: Re: reading website

On Fri, 18 Aug 2006 00:40:11 +0200, fabsy <fabbyfabs@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ok!
> But that doesn't tell me the position of the string..
> Say that you have a textfile with the sentence "Could you pass me the
> milk please?" and I make a search for the string "milk". Then I want to
> know the position of where the search word starts so I can  extract the
> word into a variable.... How do I do that?

Use String#index, or String#=~. The former works with strings and regular  
expressions, the latter requires regular expressions, but I think it also  
saves the match data into the special global variable I don't use or  
remember the name of... Anyhoo:

	>> "foobar".index "ooba"
	=> 1

	>> "foobar".index "bar"
	=> 3

	>> "foobar".index /bar/
	=> 3

	>> "foobar".index /ooba/
	=> 1

For word extraction, I'm usually very, very bad doing those with substring  
indexes and abuse regexps wildly each and every time I need to get some  
piece of text out of another one.

David Vallner