From: Jan Svitok <jan.svitok@...>
Date: 2006-11-07T05:57:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Help ruby started acting strange

On 11/6/06, Ion Frantzis <cparticle@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I need some help.  I'm having some problems with strings in Ruby.
> More specifically I keep having to explicitly convert string to
> strings.  Let me say that I've had some problems with my system and
> I've had to uninstall and reinstall ruby from the one-click installer
> for Windows 'ruby 185-21.exe'.  This might be unrelated though.
>
> Below is the code in question the current_message object is a simple
> mail object its just simple way for me to keep the various mail
> section in one object.  The first line with the Regular expression
> work with out error.  The problem is I don't understand why I need to
> specify to_s for displayName when I'm parsing out the first and last
> name.  I had to specify to_s again when I reused firstName and
> lastName later in my code.
>
> displayName = current_message.Body.scan(/^Employee Name -+> (.*)\./)
> firstName = displayName.to_s.split(", ")[1]
> lastName = displayName.to_s.split(", ")[0]
> searchUser = lastName.to_s.downcase[0,3] + firstName.to_s.downcase[0,1] + "*"
>
>
> Any clues as to what might cause something like this to happen would
> be much appreciated.
>
>
> C.Particle

Hi,

1. scan returns array of arrays, therefore you have to call
displayName = current_message.Body.scan(/^Employee Name -+> (.*)\./).first.first
Then everything will work fine. Read documentation for more precise
explanation, and possible alternatives.

2. you can do all the parsing at once:
displayName, lastName, firstName =
current_message.Body.scan(/^Employee Name -+> ((.*), (.*))\./).first

(partial version of that would be:
lastName, firstName = displayName.split(', ')

3. FYI: ruby's naming convention tends to use display_name, last_name
etc. instead of displayName, etc. It's just a convention, so feel free
to write as you  wish ;-)

4. when in doubt, use p as in p displayName to see what's happening.
In this case it would show [["Smith, John"]]. irb and ruby -rdebug are
handy as well.