From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2009-06-24T00:10:55+09:00
Subject: Re: formatting a listing

On Tue, 23 Jun 2009, George George wrote:

> @David Black:
> My input consists of digits and not letters, that is why i used digits
> in the examples above; in short what i really wanted is: Given a listing
> 1
> 2
> 3
> white space
> 3.05
> 4
> 5
> whitespace
> -6.3
> 7
>
> Produce an output such that:
> 1,-3.05,-6.3

That's a spurious - before the 3, right?

> 2,4,7
> 3,5
>
> or
> 1,-3.05,-6.3
> 2,4,7
> 3,5,0

The example that I couldn't quite figure out was the one with input
like:

   1 2,3 4

or something like that. Anyway, a simple version (which may not handle
that case) is:

$/ = "\n\n"  # if the input is definitely \n\n delimited

cols = File.open("input.csv") do |fh|
   max = 0
   fh.map do |s|
     row = s.scan(/\S+/)
     max = [max, row.size].max
     row << "0" until row.size == max
     row
   end
end


David

-- 
David A. Black / Ruby Power and Light, LLC
Ruby/Rails consulting & training: http://www.rubypal.com
Now available: The Well-Grounded Rubyist (http://manning.com/black2)
"Ruby 1.9: What You Need To Know" Envycasts with David A. Black
http://www.envycasts.com