From: Dave Bass <davebass@...>
Date: 2008-06-08T01:04:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Remove Parts of a String

Victor Reyes wrote:
> to understand:
> 
>  str.gsub(/:[^,]*(?:$|(?=,))/,'').split( ',')
> 
> you need a PhD in "General Expresionology". Ruby is supposed to be 
> simple.

At a glance you can see that gsub does something to str, and then split 
does something to the result. So the top level's quite straightforward.

The gsub regexp is not easy to understand however, and this is one of 
the problems with regexps in general. They're concise but obscure. 
Generally speaking one builds them up a little at a time, using quite a 
bit of trial and error -- or at least, that's how I do it, maybe other 
people get there in one!

A regexp like this deserves several lines of comments to explain what's 
going on. For some reason coders hate writing comments.

I would tend to do a job like this in several stages rather than in one 
line. I've learnt by bitter experience that my future self finds it 
difficult to understand concise code that my past self has written!
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