From: "Jesús Gabriel y Galán" <jgabrielygalan@...>
Date: 2010-03-26T07:35:33+09:00
Subject: Re: index of string from beginning of line vs beginning of file

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 9:09 PM, Jesse B. <jessebos@aol.com> wrote:
> Thank you Jesus,
> Your solution is much more elegant.
> However it leaves a blank line where my string was. any idea how to
> close that gap?
>
> i.e.
>
> opening text
> --/text to delete/--
> closing text
>
> now renders as:
>
> opening text
>
> closing text
>
> and what I am going for is:
>
> opening text
> closing text
>
> thanks again for all of your help!

infile = File.read("input.txt")
File.open("output.txt", "w") do |outfile|
 outfile.puts infile.split(%r{\n?--/.*?/--}m).join
end

Two changes:

- I added an optional \n at the beggining of the matched area to cover
that case, although there might be other corner cases.
- I joined the array before writing it, because puts with an array
prints a newline between each element.

See if this works for you and test any other edge case regarding
carriage returns. You can print what the split returns to see what you
get in each case:

infile = File.read("input.txt")
File.open("output.txt", "w") do |outfile|
  splitted = infile.split(%r{\n?--/.*?/--}m)
  puts splitted.inspect
 outfile.puts splitted.join
end

Jesus.