From: Justin Collins <justincollins@...>
Date: 2011-11-01T01:43:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Anything like FS in Ruby?

On 10/31/2011 03:40 AM, Wayne Brissette wrote:
> Coming over from AppleScript, one of the things I haven't been able to find is something like AppleScript's Text Item Delimiters or Awk's FS, where you can define separators for text files. For example, if I have something like this:
>
> <td>1</td>
> <td>2</td>
>
> If I set FS to<td>, then I could capture 1</td>, and 2</td>.
>
> While this isn't a great example because there are many other ways to capture this via regex. This becomes more useful with much more convoluted things. I haven't been able to find anything similar in Ruby, which probably means I need to rethink how I capture blocks of text and store them into arrays and hashes.
>
> Wayne
I believe you are looking for $/

http://www.rubyholic.com/Languages/Ruby/QuickRef.html#19

Also, you can set the record separator when calling various methods like 
gets():

http://rubydoc.info/stdlib/core/1.9.2/IO:gets

-Justin