From: Jan Svitok <jan.svitok@...>
Date: 2007-01-13T01:40:10+09:00
Subject: Re: DRY gsub...

On 1/12/07, Daniel Martin <martin@snowplow.org> wrote:
> Josselin <josselin@wanadoo.fr> writes:
>
> > I wrote the following ruby statements..  I get the result I need , I
> > tried to DRY it for 2 hours without being successfull ,
> >
> >      d = d.gsub(/\r\n/,' ')   # get rid of carriage return
> >      d = d.gsub(/;/,' ')  # replace column by space
> >      d = d.gsub(/,/,' ') # replace comma by space
> >      a  = d.split(' ')   # split into component , space as divider
> >
>
> What's wrong with:
>
>   a = d.split(/\r\n|[;, ]/)
>
> Or do you need d to be mangled as before?
>
> Although I probably would do something even shorter like this:
>
>   a = d.split(/[;,\s]+/)
>
> However, for certain inputs that won't give exactly the same as your
> initial multi-step procedure.
>
> Also, any time you write:
>
>   d = d.gsub(...)
>
> You're probably better off with:
>
>   d.gsub!(...)

...unless you don't want to modify the original object passed as
argument (I'm not sure if this is proper English construct ;-) I mean
in that case the caller will see the modifications as well)