From: Ammar Ali <ammarabuali@...>
Date: 2010-10-28T19:30:07+09:00
Subject: Re: ctype functionality without a gem?

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 1:02 PM, Anton Bangratz <tony@twincode.net> wrote:
>> I came up with this quick
>> solution for now, http://gist.github.com/650968
>
> This is similarily fragile. If you are only testing for one character,
> it seems good, if you are going to test for strings, it will not be
> enough.

I do only need to test individual characters. Extending the code to
match entire strings should be easy:

  /^[[:alnum:]]+$/


> Also, the whole solution is not necessarily fast - I do love regular
> expressions, but I would search on for other methods to meet your
> requirements. It really depends on what your goal is. If it is about
> bit streams, you might want to look into bit-struct or similar
> approaches that use Array#pack and String#unpack.

I agree, and wish this was built-in. Interesting suggestions. Thanks.

Regards,
Ammar