From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2007-07-03T23:33:13+09:00
Subject: Re: How to check for where a text file begins?

2007/7/3, Al Cholic <desertfox@hot.ee>:
> Hello,
>
> Im working with some imported text files and I need check where the
> first 2 lines of text occur.  The files can have white space in the
> beginning, so I cant just do a split("\n") and take the first two
> elements of the array.  Im a bit confused about this stuff.  Here is
> what I've been trying to do with regular expressions, but no results
> yet:
>
> def find_first_two_lines(file)
>   /\S\n\S/.match(file)
> end
>
> If anyone has any ideas, please do share!

What exactly do you want to do with them?  If you have your file
contents in a single string you can do s.sub(/^\s+/, '') in order to
get rid of all leading whitespace.  You can as well do the checking
during reading, probably like this:

contents = nil
io.each do |line|
  contents = "" if contents.nil? && /^\s*$/ =~ line
  contents << line if contents
end

Kind regards

robert