From: "Michael W. Ryder" <_mwryder@...>
Date: 2007-06-19T10:05:05+09:00
Subject: Re: How to repeat string patterns in Ruby?

Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality wrote:
>     I have some funky Python code that I'm trying to modify but it's 
> formatted with spaces instead of tabs, making it impossible to change.  Now, 
> there may be many different ways to solve this problem but the first impulse 
> I had was to write a small Ruby script to reformat the code.
>     Now, a certain pattern came up in my solution that I have seen before. 
> I wanted to do something like this:
> 
> num_tabs = num_spaces / tab_width
> tabs = num_tabs.collect { "\t" }.join
> 
>     ...but I discovered that there is not collect method in the integer 
> object.  The best I could come up with was:
> 
> tabs = ''
> num_tabs.times { tabs << "\t" }
> 
>     Is there a more succinct, more Ruby-esque way to do this?
>     Thank you...
> 
> 
> 
Couldn't you just use something like b = a.gsub("    ", "\t") where the 
number of spaces is your tab size?  This would avoid having count the 
spaces.