From: Thomas Hurst <tom.hurst@...>
Date: 2003-06-23T18:04:00+09:00
Subject: Re: String#decorate

* Martin DeMello (martindemello@yahoo.com) wrote:

> When chaining methods, it'd be neat to have something that was passed
> in the string and returned a 'decorated' version, e.g.
> 
> pp = ary.join(",").decorate {|s| "[#{s}]"}

You mean, equivilent to:

 s = ary.join(", ")
 pp = "[#{s}]"

Which you would probably be better off writing as:

 pp = "[#{ary.join(', ')}]"

And of course if you want the other way around:

 pp = ary.map { |s| "[#{s}]" }.join(", ")

If you enjoy playing with blocks, you can do:

 pp = ary.join(", ").map { |s| "[#{s}]" }.to_s

Perhaps setting $/ beforehand if you're going to be dealing with
newlines.

> attrib = title.capitalize.decorate {|t| "\t -- #{author[t]},\"#{t}\""}

 attrib = "\t -- #{author[t = title.capitalize]},\"#{t}\""

> (n*100).to_s.decorate {|p| "#{p}% done"}

This makes about as much sense as an .interpolate method:

 "#{(n*100)}% done"

> Not quite an RCR (it's trivially implementable anyway) - just wanted
> to see what people thought of the idea, and in particular if anyone
> had nicer names to suggest.

Maybe uses for it can be found more generally -- in a generic "perform
this block on myself" method?

 def Object.perform
     yield self
 end

 t = title.capitalize.perform { |t| "\t -- #{author[t]}, \"#{t}\"" }

Or more likely:

 t = books.genre[genre].first.perform { |b| "#{b.title.capitalize}: #{b.author}" }

But you're still basically replacing "b = " with " { |b| }" and adding
some overhead for the block.  Can you think of anything more worthwhile?

The best I can come up with is:

 titleFormatter = proc { |b| "#{b.title.capitalize}: #{b.author}" }
 t = books.genre[genre].first.perform(titleFormatter)

But that's just an inverted (and longer) way of doing:

 t = titleFormatter.call(books.genre[genre].first)

I'm still not seeing much point :)

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst  -  freaky@aagh.net  -  http://www.aagh.net/