From: Marc Hoeppner <marc.hoeppner@...>
Date: 2007-07-12T17:38:57+09:00
Subject: Stripping columns / puts'ing columns

Hi again,

still on my quest to learn ruby ;) And yet another question - more a
general "how-to-approach" thing, though.

Let's say I have a text file with a number of rows (it's a molecular
sequence alignment, so each row = one sequence).
I am only interested in those columns in which a certain character
appears - no matter whether in all row or only one. The whole column
should then be puts'ed.

After thinking about it for a moment, my idea was to store each row in
an array, check each array position for the presence of that particular
character and, if it is, found, to puts this array field [n] and the
corresponding field from all other arrays. Now, there are a couple of
potential problems such as hitting the same column multiple times
because I search multiple arrays... But anyways, since I am rather new
to programming and ruby in particular, that will take me a while - so I
was wondering if there is a more elegant/efficient approach to this,
before I waste my time on this only to find out it doesnt work or could
be done more efficiently (wasted quite some time on another program the
other day only to find out that it can be done with grep...yuck).

/Marc

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