From: Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@...>
Date: 2006-11-18T01:14:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Nuby question - printing substring as non-ASCII

On 11/17/06, Thomas Luedeke <tluedeke@excite.com> wrote:
> Thomas Luedeke wrote:
> > I'm reading in a string of numbers, as follows:
> >
> > "   1    45.3456   "
> >
> > How do I write out the first non-whitespace element as a number?  Ruby
> > wants to express as it in ASCII, and the .to_i method doesn't seem to
> > work on a substring.
> >
> > Thanks in advance.
> >
> > TPL
>
>
> Thanks.  Dumb question, but I'm kinda deep in the throes of the "suck"
> stage of learning Ruby.  The following also seems to work (at least for
> the purposes of reading in and writing formatted output):
>
> irb(main):001:0> string="   1   45.3456   "
> => "   1   45.3456   "
>
> irb(main):003:0> string.strip
> => "1   45.3456"
>
> irb(main):004:0> string.split[1]
> => "45.3456"
>
> irb(main):005:0> string.split[0]
> => "1"
>

Here is one way:
irb(main):001:0> string = "   1   45.3456   "
=> "   1   45.3456   "
irb(main):002:0> substrings = string.scan /[^\s]+/
=> ["1", "45.3456"]
irb(main):003:0> substrings.first.to_i
=> 1

The second line of code is saying: Scan the string, and return an
Array of strings that were made up of one or more non-whitespace
characters.

substrings.first is the same as substrings[0]