From: William James <w_a_x_man@...>
Date: 2007-09-18T04:50:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie: what's Ruby idiom for word-by-word input?

On Sep 17, 1:00 pm, Alex Shulgin <alex.shul...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sep 17, 6:19 pm, William James <w_a_x_...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Awk is a very popular tool for text processing, but there is no
> > way to make it treat a sequence of whitespace characters as a
> > record-separator. So in awk, as in Ruby, text is almost always
> > read a line at a time.
>
> I thought Ruby is not just a text processing tool, but a general
> purpose programming language.

You thought correctly.  But when you talk about reading a word at
at time from a text file, you're talking about text processing.
The point is that languages (including Ruby) that were designed
to be very good at processing text usually read a line at a time,
not a word at a time.  (A language that is very good at processing
text can still be a general purpose language.)  Reading a word at
a time seems to me to be odd and unnecessary, and I do a lot of
text processing.  However, here's one way to do it.  (It would be
a lot more efficient to read by lines.)

class IO
  def get_word
    word = nil
    while c = self.read(1)
      if c =~ /\s/
        break if word
      else
        word||=""
        word << c
      end
    end
    word
  end
end

File.open('data'){|file|
  while w = file.get_word
    p w
  end
}