From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2009-07-22T10:00:56+09:00
Subject: Re: String spliting and inclusion

Hi --

On Wed, 22 Jul 2009, Stuart Clarke wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I am having trouble working out some logic for my problem. I basically
> have a long string (320 characters) and I want to split into smaller
> strings no longer than 50 characters in length. At present I have the
> following regex:
>
> data = "big long string"
>
> puts data.scan(/{50}/)
>
> This nicely breaks up the string however there are a few problems with
> it, including:
>
> It only outputs 50 character chunks, therefore when it gets to the end
> and only 20 characters remain it misses them off the output (it outputs
> 6 50 characters strings and ignores the remaining 20)
>
> This regex also splits up words, which is something I don't want. I want
> a script to count to 50 and when it gets there, go backwards to find
> some white space and split it at that point, therefore not breaking up a
> word. As a result a number of sub strings of various sizes will be
> created all less than 50 chars.
>
> I hope this makes sense, to summarise I want to break up a string into a
> max of 50 characters without breaking up words.

Try this. I don't guarantee robustness.

   str.scan(/\b.{0,50}(?:$|\b)/m)


David

-- 
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