From: Ken Bloom <kbloom@...>
Date: 2008-01-05T02:40:00+09:00
Subject: Re: iterating over array of variables - can't change them?

On Fri, 04 Jan 2008 08:06:38 -0800, AJS wrote:

> title="Title"
> subtitle="Subtitle"
> body="Body"
> [title,subtitle,body].each {|item| item.downcase!}
> 
> This successfully sets the original variables to "title", "subtitle",
> "body"
> 
> BUT
> 
> [title,subtitle,body].each {|item| item=""}
> 
> has no effect.
> 
> Why doesn't this work? How can I make it work?
> 
> thanks

Refer to the variables as strings and use eval.

["title","subtitle","body"].each {|item| eval "#{item}=''"}

--Ken

-- 
Ken (Chanoch) Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/