From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2007-08-16T13:25:26+09:00
Subject: Re: excessively verbose request for help with regex and arrays

On Aug 15, 2007, at 21:08, Simon Schuster wrote:
> text = "(20:29:55) awhilewhileaway: I also need to assemble the
> cover/back, and figure out the innards of the aimlog
> formatting/keyword searches"
>
> what I want is essentially 3 fields, the text itself, the speaker
> (stripped of the ":") and the date information, however as far as the
> date information goes, it will be part of a short-stepped process,
> which will only need to reference the previous one, so all data can
> keep overwriting within two variables, as in: time_since_last -
> time_current = time_it_took ... I think. I'm new to programming and
> left math in highschool, so it's a weird (but very fun) place for my
> mind to be. :) still working it out.

Well, you haven't explained what you really want to do with your data  
yet, so that all sounds quite a bit complicated.  Why not start out  
with just a simple split on space:

time, speaker, content = text.split ' ', 3

Then you can parse the time:

require 'time'
time = Time.parse time

Cut off the ':' on the speaker:

speaker = speaker.sub(/:$/, '')

and you'll be left with:

p time, speaker, content
Wed Aug 15 20:29:55 -0700 2007
"awhilewhileaway"
"I also need to assemble the cover/back, and figure out the innards  
of the aimlog formatting/keyword searches"

--
Poor workers blame their tools. Good workers build better tools. The
best workers get their tools to do the work for them. -- Syndicate Wars