From: Todd Benson <caduceass@...>
Date: 2009-04-27T11:11:28+09:00
Subject: Re: How to parse a "line"?

On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 7:25 PM, Martin Sharon <huangshuo.9@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you Todd, but the number of the keywords are dynamic.
>
> and the array size is not fixed until program reads the first keywords
> of the input line.
> The line may be "3 tokyo newyork paris", also maybe
> "6 toyota bmw honda GM Ford"
>
> So I can't hard coded this array in the program.
> How can I parse the line?

If you look closely, you'll see that James' method grabs everything
from 1 to -1 (the end) of the array, omitting the zeroth element.

Robert's method assigns the garbage -- in this case, the whole array
-- to a dummy variable, and the important stuff to the var that you
care about (items).

My way was only slightly different.  I opted to create the whole
array, and then drop the first without creating an extra object.  I
had to use (items = my_item_list.split) inside parens like that
because #shift returns the object you popped off the front of the
list, and not the actual remaining stuff.

In all examples given, the size doesn't really matter... hah!  Or as
they say, it depends :-)

There are probably several ways to do this; I just like that particular one.

hth,
Todd