From: Ammar Ali <ammarabuali@...>
Date: 2011-11-09T10:36:44+09:00
Subject: Re: Parsing data with ruby

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 12:49 AM, Ronald Craft <admin@ssihosting.com> wrote:
> Peter Hickman wrote in post #1030933:
>> Well this is a bit of a hack but just to simply parse the lines you
>> could use:
>>
>> a = "10,25,40,55 * * * * /some/cron/here > /dev/null 2>&1\n30 */4 * *
>> * /some/cron/here"
>>
>> a.split(/\n/).each do |line|
>>   if line =~ /^(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(.*)$/
>>     output = Array.new
>>     output << $6
>>     output << "?"
>>     output << ($1 == "*" ? 'N' : 'Y')
>>     output << ($2 == "*" ? 'N' : 'Y')
>>     output << ($3 == "*" ? 'N' : 'Y')
>>     output << ($4 == "*" ? 'N' : 'Y')
>>     output << ($5 == "*" ? 'N' : 'Y')
>>
>>     p output
>>   end
>> end
>>
>> Which will output:
>>
>> ["/some/cron/here > /dev/null 2>&1", "?", "Y", "N", "N", "N", "N"]
>> ["/some/cron/here", "?", "Y", "Y", "N", "N", "N"]
>>
>> Note that I left the '?' for the number of servers as that is your
>> problem - Think of it as an exercise for the reader :)
>>
>> Also you might also need to match the Paul Vixie extensions for cron
>> such as @hourly and @daily
>
> Thanks for the reply. This looks like a step in the right direction. The
> only problem that I can think of is that the cron jobs aren't always
> going to have the same time, so I don't think having the " a =
> "10,25,40,55 * * * *" portion would work, as it would probably only find
> one entry of that since the times the crons execute are always going to
> vary.

split takes a second argument that specifies a limit. It will greatly
simplify parsing the lines in this case.

>> line.split(/ /, 6)
=> ["10,25,40,55", "*", "*", "*", "*", "/some/cron/here > /dev/null 2>&1"]

Regards,
Ammar