From: Paul van Delst <Paul.vanDelst@...>
Date: 2006-11-30T09:05:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Need a range, but not getting it. . . .

Peter Bailey wrote:
> Rimantas Liubertas wrote:
>>>> Your problem was that, although gsub! (with the !) normally modifies the
>>>> receiver, 'files' wasn't the receiver (to_s was), so you weren't actually
>>>> changing 'files'.
>>> Not correct. Try it.
>>>> files=["im123000-im123006"]
>> => ["im123000-im123006"]
>>>> files.to_s.gsub!(/-/,'..')
>> => "im123000..im123006"
>>>> files
>> => ["im123000-im123006"]
>>
>>
>> Regards,
>> Rimantas
> 
> Thanks. But, I'm trying to design this script for users to put in 
> arguments. (It's  an image modification script that ftps named files 
> from one server to another.) So, a user might type in: test1.rb 
> im123456-im123459 im123462 im123466

I had a similar need recently in that I wanted to specify ranges and individual numbers. I 
chose the input syntax as
   3-10,14,24,26-28
type of thing.

What about this?:

irb(main):016:0> class String
irb(main):017:1>   def parse_range  #(str)
irb(main):018:2>     sa=[]
irb(main):019:2>     self.split(",").each do |s|
irb(main):020:3*       if s=~/([\w\d]*)-([\w\d]*)/
irb(main):021:4>         sa << ($1..$2).to_a
irb(main):022:4>       else
irb(main):023:4*         sa << s
irb(main):024:4>       end
irb(main):025:3>     end
irb(main):026:2>     pr=sa.flatten.uniq
irb(main):027:2>   end
irb(main):028:1> end
=> nil
irb(main):029:0> input
=> "im123456-im123459,im123462,im123466"
irb(main):030:0> input.parse_range
=> ["im123456", "im123457", "im123458", "im123459", "im123462", "im123466"]

Not exactly the same input syntax as you have suggested you want, but close.

cheers,

paulv

-- 
Paul van Delst             Ride lots.
CIMSS @ NOAA/NCEP/EMC               Eddy Merckx