From: Robert Dober <robert.dober@...>
Date: 2007-07-10T18:47:30+09:00
Subject: Re: Beautiful Code : Pity he didn't ask here...

On 7/10/07, Martin DeMello <martindemello@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/10/07, John Carter <john.carter@tait.co.nz> wrote:
> > Since most Linux distro's roll the log files to a reasonable size I would have just gone with...
> >
> > ARGF.read.scan( %r{GET /ongoing/When/\d\d\dx/(\d\d\d\d/\d\d/\d\d/[^ .]+) }) do |match|
> >     puts $1
> > end
>
I am with James do not slurp in the whole string it just does not make
sense to me. I would feel very uneasy using regexps on large strings
even if right now there seems no backtracking issues to be present,
but code evolves sometimes ;)

> ARGF.read.scan( %r{GET /ongoing/When/\d{3}x/(\d#{4}/\d#{4}/[^ .]+) }) do |match|

Nope Martin read the original code again!!  All the / and \ ;).
I was about to fall into the same trap.
As a matter of fact I miss all beauty in that code :( The regexp is
just ugly, some ideas for cosmetic surgery ;)

def dig_dirs *args
    Regexp.new args.map{|n| "\d" * n}.join("/")
end

puts ARGF.map { |line|
    line =~ %r{ GET /ongoing/When/\d{3}x/(#{dig_dirs 4, 2, 2}/[^ .])}
    $1
}.compact

But beauty lies to everybody (or was that "in the eyes of the beholder"? ).

Cheers
Robert

-- 
I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java.
I just didn't know it would be called Ruby
-- Kent Beck