From: Ken Bloom <kbloom@...>
Date: 2007-05-04T23:10:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Is there a better way to do this?

On Fri, 04 May 2007 00:43:34 +0000, Michael W. Ryder wrote:

> As part of my learning Ruby I am trying to learn how to format strings.
>   The following is an example for formatting a U.S. phone number:
> 
> a = "1234567890"
> b = "(000) 000-0000"
> ai = 0
> 
> for i in 0..(b.length) -1
>    if b[i,1] == "0"
>      b[i,1] = a[ai,1]
>      ai += 1
>    end
> end
> puts b
> 
> Is there a better (more Rubyish) way to do this? Obviously I will want
> to add more code in the future to handle exceptions like phone numbers
> that are not 10 characters long or are longer, but this will get me
> started.

puts a.sub(/(...)(...)(....)/,'(\1) \2-\3')

when you have other formats, use if a.length == whatever to decide which 
pattern to apply.

--Ken

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/