From: andrew_queisser@... (andrew queisser)
Date: 2002-02-02T07:55:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie question

Niklas Frykholm <r2d2@acc.umu.se> wrote in message news:<slrna5jufu.kut.r2d2@shaka.acc.umu.se>...
> > What's the best way to return a substring that consists of the first 4
> > words, if words are comma-delimited, e.g.:
> >
> > My first choice was:
> >
> > 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:
> 
> On the other hand the solution above is very readable. Are you sure that this
> is where you want to save your cycles?
> 
> A solution which is similar to the one above but is more effective when the
> string contains many words is:
> 
>     line.split(",", 5)[0..3].join(",")
> 
> // Niklas

Ahh, yes, thank you! That's what I was looking for. I missed the
'limit' parameter in the documentation for the split function when I
read about it. I liked the split-join thing but the files I'm
processing are huge so the speed difference between the split-join and
the explicit loop was large.

Thanks to the others for the fancy regexp's. It'll take me a while to
digest those.

Andrew