From: Martin DeMello <martindemello@...>
Date: 2008-03-26T06:15:05+09:00
Subject: Re: golf: tabs to bullets

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 2:02 PM, Martin DeMello <martindemello@gmail.com> wrote:
> Given:
>   an outline list, with each line indented by a series of tabs
>   a list of bullets (assume a circular list, for simplicity)
>
>  Write a function that replaces every tab with two spaces, except for
>  the last one, which is replaced by a bullet.

Code is worth a thousand descriptions:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

file = ARGV[0]
MARKERS = "*-ox".split(//)

def bullet(n)
  MARKERS[n % MARKERS.length]
end

IO.foreach(file) {|line|
  a = line.gsub(/^\t+/, "")
  n = line.length - a.length - 1
  replace = n == -1 ? "" :  "  "*(n)+ bullet(n) + " "
  out = line.gsub(/^\t+/, replace)
  puts out
}

martin