From: David Alan Black <dblack@...>
Date: 2002-07-24T01:54:13+09:00
Subject: Re: Strings and member-operators

Hi --

On Wed, 24 Jul 2002, Tom Sawyer wrote:

> let me get this straight? is the original question how to strip a string
> and remove quotes?
>
>   /^("?)(.*)\1$/.match(self)[2].strip
>
> this only does double quotes and its striping after the quotes removal.
> is that what's wanted? well, i'll assume so. what about without regexp?
>
>   return str[1..-1].strip if str[0..0] + str[-1..-1] == '""'
>
> hmmm... you'd think there'd be a real simple way to do this without
> regexp, can it get any simpler?

Well, I find the regex version simpler :-)  To take care of single
quotes, by the way, just change it to:

  /^(["']?)(.*)\1$/

But still, if you wanted to do it without using a regex, you could do
something like your code but you'd need an 'else' in there somewhere:

  class String
    def stripQuotes
      if self[0] == ?" && self[-1] == self[0]
	self[1..-2].strip
      else
	strip
      end
    end
  end


(I've formatted it to be runnable with Dossy's test suite.)

My thinking in doing this:

  if self[0] == ?" && self[-1] == self[0]

was to make modifying it easier:

  if %q{' "}.include?(self[0]) ...

(which is probably stupid, since it's not like I'm really
parameterizing it), and also to avoid the '+' operation because that
runs into problems with an empty string.  In fact I think it would
also give weird results with the string '"' (namely, it would see that
[0] and [-1] added up to '""', which is a false positive if you're
looking for matching double quotes).


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav