From: Michael McDaniel <ruby@...>
Date: 2002-04-11T02:33:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Addition to file.c (File.extension)

Mike Hall wrote:

> Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> 
>> |YANAGAWA Kazuhisa wrote:
>> |> Uh, but that seems too dosish for me....  Nowadays there's so many
>> |> people who lives on Windows environments, and they don't doubt `.ext'
>> |> is called `extension', but also there's those who are familiar to more
>> |> generic `suffix'.
> 
>> |I vote it.
> 
>> "suffix" maybe better than "extension", but it too have same ambiguity.
>> Notice it's "File.suffix", not "FileName.suffix".
> 
> This is a fun can of worms!
> 
> Maybe we're going about this the wrong way?
> All I want to do is separate a generic file path into:
> - directory
> - basename
> - extension or suffix
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Maybe I'm missing something, but I just do something like this (on UNIX) ...

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby


def fdir(str)
  m = /.*\//.match(str)
  if m != nil; then m.to_s ; else "" ; end
end

def f(str)
  m = /.*\//.match(str)
  if m != nil; then m.post_match ; else "" ; end

end

def fend(str)
  m = /.*\./.match(str)
  if m != nil; then m.post_match ; else "" ; end
end


                        # for testing, define environment variable 
                        # FTEST=1 before running...
if ENV['FTEST']; then
  filenames = [ 
    "/tmp/fubar/filename",
    "/tmp/fubar/filename.txt",
    "/tmp/fubar/filename.txt.bak",
    "/tmp/fubar foo/filename",
    "/tmp/fubar foo/filename.txt",
    "/tmp/fubar foo/filename.txt.bak",
    "/tmp/fubar foo/some filename",
    "/tmp/fubar foo/some filename.txt",
    "/tmp/fubar foo/some filename.txt.bak"
  ]

  filenames.each { |f|   print (f), ": ", fdir(f), ", ", f(f), ", ", 
fend(f), "\n" }

end

# end

Of course, you could add the methods to whatever class you wanted...

~mm

> 
> The first two currently exist as clones of UNIX shell commands.
> Convenient, but not always useful.
> 
> What if we had a new Ruby method that did what we want?
> Maybe a version of File.split which returns [dir, root, suffix]?
> Then we don't have to name it!   :-)
> 
> (Although File.split always gets me, because I expect an array
> of directory components).
> 
> FWIW: Tcl uses 'file dirname', 'file rootname', and 'file extension'.
> 
> --
> Mike Hall
> http://www.enteract.com/~mghall