From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2010-03-31T00:35:54+09:00
Subject: Re: return number of spaces at the beginning of a line

2010/3/30 Colin Bartlett <colinb2r@googlemail.com>:
> On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 2:18 PM, Robert Klemme
> <shortcutter@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> 2010/3/30 Jesse B. <jessebos@aol.com>:
>>> This second post with the "spaces only" fix seems to meet all the needs
>>> of what I was looking for.
>>>
>>> I love that this got 9 replies in the middle of the night.
>>> thanks everyone for your help.
>>
>> What do you mean, middle of the night?  It's quite sunny here and the
>> sun isn't even going to settle soon. ;-)
>
> Well, it's also nowhere near the middle of the night here
> (n*100 kilometres west of Robert?, where 0 < n < 13?)

Yeah, that sounds about right.

> but it's definitely not "quite sunny"! In fact, it's raining!
> (To quote from "A Song of the Weather"
>  by Flanders and Swann - 1950s/1960s sort of English Tom Lehrer's:
>  April brings the sweet spring showers.
>  On and on for hours and hours.)

I think I have to hurry: rain radar indicates showers coming my way.

> How about this? I think it's different from the other solutions(?),
> it seems to work, and it doesn't create a string object(?).
>  (str =~ /[^ ]/) || str.length

I'm afraid, that is not correct; the String is created as a side
effect and stored in a global variable:

irb(main):001:0> str = "   foo"
=> "   foo"
irb(main):002:0> str =~ /[^ ]/
=> 3
irb(main):003:0> $&
=> "f"

And it has the disadvantage over str[/\A */].length that likely is
slower because of the alternative.

Kind regards

robert

-- 
remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end
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