From: Moya Pilot <a3794202@...>
Date: 2010-04-26T08:23:50+09:00
Subject: Re: When to use a db?

Thank you all for your comments, I really appreciate it.  I have to 
admit I am new to Ruby and fairly new to programming in any language and 
am still confused about a lot of things.

To explain my needs a little better, I am reading in thousands of lines 
in a day via a tcp connection.  Most lines will be one attribute updates 
to an object but the lines I am reading are like so
NAME, jim joe, 123-456-7890, 123 elm st, zip
PREFS, firefox, flash 10, java, windows, jim joe
FAVORITES, facebook, jim joe, ebay, google

In short, I am reading them in via fastercsv and working on using an if 
statement to do something to see if the username exists in the array 
already, if so update the object found with the needed data.  If not add 
the new data to as a new object in the array.

User = Struct.new(:a, b:, c:, d:, e:, f:, g:, h:, i:, j:, k:, l:, m:, 
n:, o:, p:, q:, r:)
array=[]
CSV.parse lines do |row|
if ( lines =~ /^NAME:/)
  array.find{ |foobar| if foobar.b == row[1]
        puts "User already added"

elsif ( lines =~ /^PREFS:/)
  array.find{ |foobar| if foobar.b == row[5]
        puts "This is where I need so other help, I need to add this 
rows contents[0..4] to the object matching in the array, so I think 
something like foobar[6, 7, 8, 9] = row[1, 2, 3, 4]"

elsif ( lines =~ /^FAVORITES:/)
  array.find{ |foobar| if foobar.b == row[2]
        puts "This is where I need so other help, I need to add row[1, 
3, 4] contents to the object matching in the array, so I think something 
like foobar[12, 14, 15] = row[1, 3, 4]"

else
  array << User.new(*row[0..5])
   end }

I have been re-reading some more on hashes but I am still confused on 
the differences between hashes and arrays.  If it is simply just giving 
a name to something like array[0] I am not sure how that speeds things 
up.  I am also still confused on how to efficiently add the cvs parsed 
rows into an object in the array.  Is array.find my best bet if using an 
array?  Would hashes work or BDB, GDBM or SQLite be better suited 
towards this?

Thanks again I appreciate all your help.

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