From: gabriele renzi <surrender_it@...1.vip.ukl.yahoo.com>
Date: 2004-03-28T00:29:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Formatting dates and counting words

il Sun, 28 Mar 2004 03:07:44 +1200, "Robo" <robo@mars.com> ha
scritto::

>Hi,
>
>Just got started on making a real attempt in building a Ruby app, and got
>some basic questions:
>
>How do I format a date? E.g. something like PHP's date() function where it
>can show a date as a string in various formats:

I believe Time#strftime() is what you need

>http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php
>
>Secondly, given a string, how do I get the first few words from it? e.g. If
>a string has 50 words, I want the first 10 words return.

please define what "word" means. 
usually this could work:

>> s="this is   a  string of \n7 words"
=> "this is \ta  string of \n7 words"
>> ary=s.split(/\s+/)
=> ["this", "is", "a", "string", "of", "7", "words"]
>> ary[0..2]
=> ["this", "is", "a"]

Or you could use \W+ or [a-z]+ or..