From: steve ross <cwdinfo@...>
Date: 2011-11-07T05:59:15+09:00
Subject: Re: "A" and "an" articles in front of words

Sorry to be late to the party on this one, but a regex seems a bit of a big hammer. How about:

def article_for(noun)
  article = %w(a e i o u).include?(noun[0..0]) ? 'an' : 'a'
  "#{article} #{noun}"
end

irb(main):022:0> article_for 'dog'
=> "a dog"
irb(main):023:0> article_for 'animal'
=> "an animal"


On Oct 31, 2011, at 7:14 AM, Dave Aronson wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 22:23, jake kaiden <jakekaiden@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>>  ruby Strings have an easy way of finding the first letter, the `[]`
>> method...  you can do something like this:
>> 
>>  string = "hi there"
>>  puts string[0]
>> 
>>  => h
> 
> In 1.9 yes... but many people are still on 1.8, which will give a
> number instead.  Gotta use string[0:0] instead.  :-(
> 
>>  you could use a regular expression
>> (http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.2/Regexp.html) to determine whether to
>> put an "a" or an "an" before each word based on its first letter...
> 
> If she's having a hard time extracting a character from a string, I
> don't think it's sporting to hit her with regexps quite yet.  ;-)
> 
> -Dave
> 
> -- 
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