From: Ron Coutts <rcoutts@...>
Date: 2003-12-16T08:12:03+09:00
Subject: Re: Extracting multiple lines from a file

> If the file is a reasonable size, if might be easier to do
> 
> content = File.read("ordinal")
> content.scan(/^START(.*?)^END/m) do |match,|
>    p match
> end
> 
> This reads in the whole file, then calls the block passing in the 
> chunks of it between START and END.
> 

Thanks Dave and Rodrigo for your regex solutions.  The file is small
enough so the solution above is good.  I got the part that reads the
block content down to one line because I have a multiple content blocks
to extract from the same file.  Here it is.

content = File.read("ordinal")
block_content = content.scan(/BEGIN\n(.*?)END\n/m).join

If anyone's doing a Ruby Cookbook, please throw in this solution, or one
like it!  :)

Thanks all for your quick replies.  Much appreciated!

Ron

P.S. I was using Ruby 1.8.0