From: Michael Witrant <mike@...>
Date: 2002-02-01T08:10:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie question

On Fri, 1 Feb 2002 06:54:09 +0900
andrew_queisser@hp.com (andrew queisser) wrote:

> What's the best way to return a substring that consists of the first 4
> words, if words are comma-delimited, e.g.:
> [...]
> line.split(",")[0..3].join(",")
> 
> but that can't be very efficient. I tried to do an explicit loop but I
> couldn't get it any better than this:
> [...]

I would keep this one anyway. I don't think you can obtain much faster
than that in pure Ruby, except maybe through regular expressions. But is
effectiveness only a matter of speed? It's much more readable and
maintainable than a loop. It expresses almost exactly what you want.

If speed is really an issue, then write this part in a C extension, if
possible. Or wait for a magic regexp.


Mike.