From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2008-04-30T23:14:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Search string for occurneces of words stored in array

Hi --

On Wed, 30 Apr 2008, John Butler wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have a sentence "This is my test sentence" and an array["is", "the",
> "my"] and what i need to do is find the occurence of any of thearray
> words in the sentence.
>
> I have this working in a loop but i was wondering is there a way to do
> it using one of rubys string methods.
>
> Its sililar to the include method but searching for multiple words not
> just one.
>
> "This is my test sentence".include?("This") returns true
>
> but i want something like
>
> "This is my test sentence".include?("This", "is", "my")
>
> anyone got a nice way to do this? I only need to find if one of the
> words occure and then i exit.


You could use any?

irb(main):001:0> words = %w{ This is my }
=> ["This", "is", "my"]
irb(main):002:0> sentence = "This is my test sentence"
=> "This is my test sentence"
irb(main):003:0> words.any? {|word| sentence.include?(word) }
=> true
irb(main):004:0> sentence = "Hi"
=> "Hi"
irb(main):005:0> words.any? {|word| sentence.include?(word) }
=> false

Another possibility:

irb(main):009:0> sentence = "This is my test sentence"
=> "This is my test sentence"
irb(main):010:0> re = Regexp.new(words.join('|'))
=> /This|is|my/
irb(main):011:0> sentence =~ re
=> 0


David

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