From: Mark S Bilk <mark@...>
Date: 2009-04-06T23:54:16+09:00
Subject: Re: String.split crashes my program

On Apr 6, 7:21 am, Tomas Na <kraz...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I am trying to split a string by spaces and then loop through each
> entry, adding it to an array if it is more then 4 characters long and
> not already in the array.
>
> I haven't got very far with it, but I have come up against this problem
> where split just crashes my program with no errors.
>
> def GetUniqueTextValues(sText)
>   aTags = Array.new
>
>   puts sText
>   aTags = sText.split
>   puts sText
>
>   return aTags
> end
>
> What happens when I run this is the text is output for the first puts,
> but not for the second. If I comment out the split then the text is
> output twice, once for each puts. I read in the ruby docs that split
> with no parameters will split by space, but I also tried split(' ') and
> split(/ /) with the same crashing effect. I use split another place in
> my program like this:
>
> saHeadParts = line.split(/: /)
>
> and it works fine, so I don't understand why it wont work this time. Can
> anyone help me fix this?
> --
> Posted viahttp://www.ruby-forum.com/.

I'm very new at Ruby, but that code works for me:
--------------------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/ruby

def GetUniqueTextValues(sText)
  aTags = Array.new

  puts sText
  aTags = sText.split
  puts sText

  return aTags
end

a = GetUniqueTextValues('mary had a little lamb')
a.each { |x| puts x }
--------------------------------------------
prints:
mary had a little lamb
mary had a little lamb
mary
had
a
little
lamb
--------------------------------------------
I'm using:
ruby 1.8.6 (2007-06-07 patchlevel 36) [i586-linux]
in OpenSuSE Linux 10.3, kernel 2.6.22.19-0.2

It works the same without the Array.new line.