From: "Jesús Gabriel y Galán" <jgabrielygalan@...>
Date: 2010-03-27T05:48:18+09:00
Subject: Re: index of string from beginning of line vs beginning of file

On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Jesse B. <jessebos@aol.com> wrote:
> Thank You Robert,
> I tried running this and unfortunately it shows the line break (newline)
> with or without the leading space before the "comment".
>
> So I think Jesus is unto something with the "joined the array before
> writing it because puts with an array prints a newline between each
> element."
>
> Now I just need to figure out how to have it not do the newline when
> there are spaces before the "comment"
> thanks for your time.

I think there's no solution to that. I mean, the requirement is to
remove what's inside the comments, and that leaves a line with a
single space. Both my solution and Robert's do exactly that (I think
Robert's solution is the better one).

What you are asking now is for an additional condition, that it might
be that if after removing the comments there's an empty line (a line
with only spaces), that should be removed too.

content = File.read "input.txt"
content.gsub! %r{--/.*?/--}m, ''
content.gsub! %r{\A\s+\z}, '' # untested and i think you might to
remove a \n in this case too, give it a try.

File.open "output.txt", "w" do |out|
   out.write content
end


Or maybe the condition is to remove all the whitespace and \n that
surround the comments.

content = File.read "input.txt"
content.gsub! %r{[\n\s]*--/.*?/--[\n\s]*}m, ''   #untested also, but
you get the idea.

File.open "output.txt", "w" do |out|
   out.write content
end

Hope this helps,

Jesus.