From: Zoltan Dezso <maildeliverysubs@...>
Date: 2008-03-26T16:29:30+09:00
Subject: Re: sorting text in a file

Adam Akhtar wrote:
> Hi Ive been hacking away at this all morning and getting nowhere fast.
> Im relatively new to ruby and im not so hot at regex.

Hi,

How about something like this quick script:
don't forget the /m modifier for multiline matching mode.
(it assumes that there is no newline in the artist name part though)

File.open('events.txt', 'r') {|f|
  contents = f.read()
  contents.split(/\n\n\n\n/).each {|conevt|
    if (conevt =~ /([^\n]*)\n\n(.*)/im)
      artist = $1
      description = $2
      print "ARTIST: #{artist}\nDESC: #{description}\n\n"
    end
  }
}

> Second am i going about this the write way. Should I have just avoided
> regex and simply read the file line by line using if structures to
> figure out which lines are with which event???

From what I can see, I guess this is the format you have to deal with... 
in this case, I believe regexp are the way to go and you will only hurt 
yourself in the long term with switch-case spaghetti :)

In case, you can get your hands on other formats, or if you are in 
charge of creating the data in the first place, I wouldn't recommend 
using plain text in the first place (yaml, xml, ini, whichever you like 
best), but I think that is not an option for you.

Zaki
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