From: Martin DeMello <martindemello@...>
Date: 2007-03-16T07:05:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Need help converting Perl to Ruby (detecting integers and decimals in strings)

On 3/16/07, Martin DeMello <martindemello@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/16/07, Paul <tester.paul@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Background context:  @rawfields is an array that holds the contents of
> > an imported line from a text file.  Here are some sample lines from
> > the input file:
> > ---
> > "0"     "0"     "0"     "0"     "0"     "0"     "Bar"
> > "5.66666"       "0"     "3.566662"      "1.383332"      "6"     "0"     "Foo"
>
> >> rawfields = ["5.66666", "0", "3.566662", "1.383332", "6", "0", "Foo"]
> => ["5.66666", "0", "3.566662", "1.383332", "6", "0", "Foo"]
>
> >> rawfields.map {|field| "%0.2f" % Float(field) rescue field}
> => ["5.67", "0.00", "3.57", "1.38", "6.00", "0.00", "Foo"]

oops - missed the fact that you didn't want integers converted into
decimals. Best way I can think of is a two level try/rescue-try/rescue

>> rawfields.map {|field| "%d" % Integer(field) rescue "%0.2f" %
Float(field) rescue field}
=> ["5.67", "0", "3.57", "1.38", "6", "0", "Foo"]

More explicitly

rawfields.map do |field|
  begin
    "%d" % Integer(field)
  rescue
    begin
        "%0.2f" % Float(field)
    rescue
       field
    end
  end
end

martin