From: Gregory Seidman <gsslist+ruby@...>
Date: 2007-01-13T08:27:56+09:00
Subject: Re: DRY gsub...

On Sat, Jan 13, 2007 at 02:04:31AM +0900, James Britt wrote:
[...]
> Looking at this, and some of the suggested alternatives, I can see how 
> it would get tedious to add more characters to the "replace with space" 
> set.
> 
> The use of compact regular expressions doesn't make the code easier to 
> read or maintain.
> 
> It may be useful to define the set of special characters, then use that 
> to  drive a string transformation.
> 
> REPLACE_WITH_SPACE = %w{
>   \r\n
>   ;
>   ,
> }.map{ |c| Regexp.new(c) }
> 
> class String
>    def swap_to_spaces
>      s = self.dupe
>      REPLACE_WITH_SPACE.each do |re|
>          s.gsub!( re, ' ')
>      end
>      s
>    end
> end
> 
> 
> a =  d.swap_to_spaces.split( ' ' )
> 
> 
> 
> Or something along those lines.

Cleaned up:

DELIMITERS = Regexp.new([
  " ",
  "\r\n",
  ";",
  ","
].map{ |c| Regexp.escape(c) }.join("|"))

a = d.split(DELIMITERS)

> James Britt
--Greg