From: Marc Hoeppner Date: 2007-07-09T16:42:54+09:00 Subject: Text parser / reformatting Hi everyone, I expect this is a rather trivial problem, but I just started using ruby and am a bit stuck right now. Here is what I want to do: I have a text file, that contains information in the following format: KOG0003 At2g36170 At3g52590 CE15495 7295730 KOG0004 Hs20476120 YIL148w YKR094c SPAC11G7.04 Now, this has to go into a relational database. But right now this is not really a table. The desired output would look something like this: KOG0003 At2g36170 KOG0003 At3g52590 KOG0003 CE15495 KOG0003 7295730 KOG0004 Hs20476120 KOG0004 YIL148w KOG0004 YKR094c Well, you get the picture. What I tried to do is to read the text file, than look for lines that start with a blank and replace that blank with the first word of the previous line, given that this line does in fact starts with a word (could also be selected by using KOG[0-9]*). I thought of storing the KOG[0-9] in a variable, but overall I cant make it work and have no real idea how to solve this. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Guess for an experienced user this is a three-liner ._. Cheers, Marc -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.