From: Gennady Bystritsky <Gennady.Bystritsky@...>
Date: 2009-03-05T17:30:55+09:00
Subject: Re: Cut a string each 80 character

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Leo [mailto:minilith@gmail.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2009 9:53 PM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: Re: Cut a string each 80 character
> 
> > string.scan(%r{.{1,80}}).map { |_chunk|
> >   _chunk + '<br />'
> > }
> 
> Isn't that pretty much the same as:
> 
> string.gsub(%r{.{1,80}}, "\\0<br />")
> 
> leo.

Almost. The latter produces a string with "<br />" after every 80 chars, while the former returns an array of strings 86 chars long each. What is more appropriate depends on a context. Say, you may want to decorate chunks even further by passing them through some other methods (on the other hand, grep with a block may be used for that as well).

The latter may be faster, though. 

Thanks for bringing it up,
Gennady.