From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2008-12-25T02:26:48+09:00
Subject: Re: newbie qusetion: read a file and print out same file

Hi --

On Thu, 25 Dec 2008, joemacbusiness@gmail.com wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> How do I read an input file and print it back to STDOUT
> exactly as the original file.   This should be very simple
> but the output of my program is all garbled.
> What am I doing wrong?
> ( I am using http://www.rubycentral.com/book to learn Ruby)
>
> The program, input, and runtime output are below.
>
> Thanks, --JM
> ================= snip ==============
>
> $ cat ./test56.rb
> #!/usr/local/bin/ruby
>
> inputFile = File.readlines("input4", 'r')
>
> for item in inputFile
>    item.chop()
>    print item, "\n"
> end

You're working too hard :-)

   input_file = File.readlines("input4")
   puts input_file

or just

   puts File.read("input4")

If you do have occasion to loop through an array of lines (which no
doubt you will at some point), remember that chop doesn't do a
permanent chop. What you probably want is chomp!, which removes a
trailing newline if there is one.


David

-- 
David A. Black / Ruby Power and Light, LLC
Ruby/Rails consulting & training: http://www.rubypal.com
Coming in 2009: The Well-Grounded Rubyist (http://manning.com/black2)