From: Esmail Bonakdarian <ebonak-a@...>
Date: 2006-10-06T08:35:06+09:00
Subject: Re: 1st program -- how would you improve this?

David Vallner wrote:
> I'd probably have used OpenURI and then
> 
> 	text = open('http://www.example.com/').read
 > which I find a little more readable.

ah .. cool .. I got what I had before from some sample
code I found either in a book or on line. Lots of ways
to do things, hence my query, and goal to find out :-)

> Oh, and probably also a HTML parser like Hpricot to make getting the
> title tag more foolproof.

Some one else had mentioned Hpricot .. but that's an add-on, right?
Ie not part of the standard Ruby distribution? My goal is to write
code that will run pretty much everywhere w/o special requirements,
but I will look into Hpricot since it seems very useful.

> I also strongly disapprove of the Perl-ish use of global variables that
> get set as a side-effect of a regex match. Notably because that's a)
> relying on a side-effect of a function on b) a global variable. But
> coding everything explicitly is a personal pet peeve of mine.

Oh, I'm all for explicitly coding too .. (ie don't rely on default
initial values for variables, always explicitly initialize them myself
- good habit in case you work with a language that doesn't do that for
you, like C. or use parens etc.)

So, by globals, are you referring to the $` and $' ?