From: Frank Mitchell <frankm@...>
Date: 2001-10-20T14:46:47+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:22813] PLease condense my code

First off, it was a pleasure to meet so many people on this list at
RubyConf.

As a complete Ruby amateur, I'm still getting used to Ruby's semantics
and object library.  (The syntax is a snap.  Thanks, matz.)  For my own
education, then, I wonder if some old Ruby hand could help me condense
some code I wrote way back in April.

At the time I was trying to convince a group of Java programmers and QA
guys that scripting languages beyond Bourne shell could make their lives
easier.  My example came from a small tool I wrote to automate progress
reports.  The file containing my 'todo' list contained what my manager
wanted ... and a lot of stuff he didn't.  So here's the Ruby code to
strip out the latter:

	#!/usr/bin/env ruby

	do_print = true

	($<).each_line { |line|
	    case line
	    when /=begin/ then
	        do_print = false
	    when /=end/ then 
	        do_print = true
	    when /=[-a-zA-Z0-9. ]*=/ then
	        # do nothing
	    else
	        if do_print then
	            puts line
	        end
	    end
	}

Unfortunately, for what it does, this seems awfully verbose, especially
since this is the original (sorry) Perl version:

	#!/usr/bin/perl

	while (<>) {
	   if (!(/=begin/../=end/) && !(/^=[-a-zA-Z0-9. ]*=/)) {
	        print
	   }
	}

This afternoon, I tried to shrink down the Ruby, with no success; for
example Ranges behave perfectly logically and therefore not like
Perl's.  To me, line and character count are far less important than
legibility ... but I'd like to make a case for Ruby to our sysadmins who
already use Perl, and from looking at router config files I suspect they
value minimizing keystrokes over minimizing head-scratching.

Thanks in advance to anyone who picks up the task.

P.S. The "[-a-zA-Z0-9. ]" isn't something like "^=.*=\s*$" because those
lines were subheadings to navigate my ever-growing todo list; I wanted
to not match lines that had '='..'=' for some other reason.  I was also
in a hurry, and didn't have time to experiment with the second regex, or
explore how it would deal with DOS linefeeds on a UNIX system.  (The
file has DOS linefeeds for attachment to Microsoft Exchange mail
messages.)

P.P.S. Feel free to tell me how horrible my Perl is, too.

-- 
Frank Mitchell (frankm@bayarea.net)
"What is luck?  Luck is probability taken personally.  Luck is the
excitement of bad math." -- Penn Jillette