From: RichardLMuller@... (Richard)
Date: 2003-06-05T13:17:30+09:00
Subject: ios.gets doesn't seem to work as advertised

I've got the following script in a Win2000SP3 environment running Ruby
1.6.8:

[snip]
	while rec = File.new(fullFileName).gets("\r\n")	
		puts "Record: "+rec
	end

for a file whose content is say:

AAA
BBB
CCC

with \r\n as the record separator (determined by viewing with a hex
editor).  What I expected is:

Record: AAA
Record: BBB
Record: CCC

What I got is:

Record: AAA
BBB
CCC
Record: AAA
BBB
CCC
[ad nauseum]

So it appears that IO$gets returns a array of "lines" again and again,
rather than each "line" successively, as described in Programming
Ruby.

The kernel$gets works by returning individual lines and recognizes the
\r\n delimiter automatically. I had to go to the IO version because I
wanted to read from multiple files and needed to know the name of the
file being read, which didn't seem possible if I passed an array to
ARGV.  Resetting ARGV with different filenames was flagged as an
error.

I don't want to read the entire file into memory for several reasons. 
My application may encounter excessively large files.  Secondly, my
application runs in a thread that processes the latest records added
to the file and idles when there are no new records to be inspected.

Any suggestions?

TIA,
Richard