From: sto.mar@...
Date: 2013-04-20T18:41:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Input: sentence Modify: words Output: modified sentence

Am 20.04.2013 04:46, schrieb Philip Parker:
> Thank you all! You are helping me to understand more complicated
> expressions.  I actually did get it to work with my simple logic:

The below code doesn't look "rubyish" at all.
A few suggestions:

- use descriptive variable names, not `s', `p', ...
   (then you can get rid of most of the comments)
- do not use `while' loop, use `each' !!!
- do not use global variables

> #Limitations: assumes no internal punctuation (i.e. hyphens, commas,
> periods on abbreviations, quotes, apostrophes, etc.)
> #Known outputs: will return unmodified alphanumeric instances, for
> example "3rd".
>
>     s="There are 12 chickens for 2 roosters."
> #get punctuation from end of sentence
>     p=s[-1].chr

chr is not needed, s[-1] already is a string with length 1

> #create array without end punctuation
>     anop = s.split(p)

s[0...-1], split is not needed here

> #create the sentence no end punctuation
>      snop = anop.join

not needed when you don't split

> #Make initial word array equal to working output array
>      array = output = snop.split(' ')

why 2 arrays? you could just append words to an initially empty output array

> #iterate through all words in the array. If digits then return
> unchanged, otherwise abbreviate as requested.
> $i = 0
> $num = a.length
> while $i < $num  do
>     if a[$i].match(/\d/)
>     then output[$i]=a[$i]
>     else output[$i]=a[$i][0].chr + (a[$i].length-2).to_s + a[$i][-1].chr
>     end
>     $i +=1
> end

1. iteration: use each and append to an initially empty output array
2. if: `then' is not needed; bad indentation:

if ...
   output...
else
   output...
end

> #add punctuation back to last word
> output[-1]<<p
> #rejoin output array as abbreviated sentence
> os = output.join(' ')
> #output abbreviated sentence
> puts os

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