From: Tim Hunter <TimHunter@...>
Date: 2007-06-30T20:59:57+09:00
Subject: Re: storing and manipulating columns of data

baptiste Augui� wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Being used to deal with Octave / Matlab, I'm a bit confused by Ruby 
> structures (arrays, hashes, etc). I have this data file "data.dat" 
> with 3 columns:
>
> I would like to think of the columns as arrays "a", "b", "c", execute 
> a loop along their indices, pick the values i want, and do something 
> with them. What would be a sensible data structure for this?
> I can read this datafile line by line using IO:readlines("data.dat"), 
> but I cannot find a way to refer to one column in the array of strings 
> generated.
>
You can use String#split to split each line into an array of 3 numbers. 
If you want to use the array values as numbers, you'll need to use 
String#to_f as well to convert the strings to numeric values.

ri String#split
ri String#to_f

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