From: Chris Shea <cmshea@...>
Date: 2007-02-02T13:30:06+09:00
Subject: Re: halving a string

On Feb 1, 9:20 pm, "Trans" <transf...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 1, 11:10 pm, "Chris Shea" <cms...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > I have a vacuum fluorescent display in my office, and I've been
> > messing around with it. Now that I've figured out how to communicate
> > with the serial connection it's time for some fun. Its shortcoming is
> > its 2 lines of 20 chars. So I naturally wrote a fortune cookie program
> > for it.
>
> > I want to make adding new fortunes easy (and without having to figure
> > out myself where to force a line break), so I basically need to split
> > a string (approximately) in half at a word boundary. This is what I
> > have:
>
> > class String
> >   def halve
> >     first_half = ''
> >     second_half = self
> >     until first_half.length >= length / 2
> >       match = / /.match(second_half)
> >       first_half << match.pre_match << ' '
> >       second_half = match.post_match
> >     end
> >     [first_half.strip, second_half]
> >   end
> > end
>
> > I have a feeling there's a one-line regexp that can do this. Am I
> > right? If not, is there a better way?
>
> untested but...
>
>   i = [0..str.size / 2].index(' ')
>   first_half, second_half = str[0...i], str[i..-1].strip
>
> however, you might just prefer
>
>   require 'facets/core/string/word_wrap'
>   str.word_wrap(20)
>
> T.

Tested, and failed. The index returns the position of the very first
space. (Also, it would have to be str[0..(str.size / 2)].index(' ')
but, still, it's no good).

Word wrapping is wrong for the occasion, as I'd like to split even
lines less than 20 chars, and have them of approximately equal length.