From: Charles Hixson <charleshixsn@...>
Date: 2013-04-19T10:52:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Match against multiple patterns problem

On 04/18/2013 11:37 AM, Joel Pearson wrote:
> How about this?
>
> def test(s)
>    return ['1',''] if !s.is_a?(String) || s.empty?
>    case s
>    when /^([^\W_]+)/
>    ['a', $1]
>    when /^(\s+)/
>    ['s', $1]
>    when /^([[:cntrl:]]+)/
>    ['c', $1]
>    when /^([[:punct:]_]+)/
>    ['p', $1]
>    when /^([^\w\s[:cntrl:][:punct:]]+)/
>    ['r', $1]
>    end
> end
>
Given that $1 means what I think it means from context, that would work, 
but I dislike the global variables with pattern matching.  I understand 
that some people consider assignment within an if statement to be worse, 
but I'm not one of them.  Were I to use that form, I'd indent it 
differently (maybe you normally do).  Also, there would need to be a 
default case to handle uncovered options (which just prints an error 
message and returns ["2", ""].  empty? instead of a length test is 
reasonable, and I should think about adopting that change.

But really my problem was being mislead by error messages about what the 
problem actually was.

-- 
Charles Hixson