What is the better way? (Note that in practice I'm using this to
operate on several strings in series, where each string has a number in
the same columnar position that needs to be incremented by three.)
Ok, at the moment it doesn't handle minuses correctly; but with a bit of
work to iron that out, and with some rules on handling "empty" columns
(are they padded with spaces or 0 length?), that might be a place to
start.
If you never have a 3 digit number and the spacing never changes,
m = "17 75 -1 25 -1 52 43 37 0"
n = " 75 52 43 37 0"
p m
p m.scan(/.{1,2}/).tap{|a|
a[22],a[24]=(a[22].to_i+3).to_s,(a[24].to_i+4).to_s}.join
puts
p n
p n.scan(/.{1,2}/).tap{|a|
a[22],a[24]=(a[22].to_i+3).to_s,(a[24].to_i+4).to_s}.join
This may not solve your problem but maybe it will give you some other ideas.
My actual use case, as it happens, involves shelling out to Ruby from
Vim, and I do not at first glance see how this would fit into that
approach. Here's my original approach, as a Vim command:
That still does not work since it is based solely on a single line.
With columns optionally empty you cannot derive from a single line the
width of the whitespace separators. This is nothing which can be
solved by any amount of coding magic done with a single line. You
either need more lines or additional information which is fed into the
process. But information contained in a single line does not allow to
identify column positions properly.
Ok, at the moment it doesn't handle minuses correctly; but with a bit of
work to iron that out, and with some rules on handling "empty" columns
(are they padded with spaces or 0 length?), that might be a place to
start.
Given the contents of the strings in question, the regex could be
simplified to /-?\d+/ because positives are never indicated by plus
signs. This is a pretty good solution to the problem as I stated it,
but I unfortunately forgot to mention that sometimes some columns might
be empty -- so you get a blue ribbon for solving the problem I
described, even if it doesn't solve the problem I actually had to solve.
Thanks for the ideas for how to write a better substitution routine than
I had. These may not actually work in this specific case, but it's
always instructive to see what approaches to solving problems come from
different perspectives.
···
On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 10:34:51AM +0200, Robert Klemme wrote:
. . . and after thinking about this and experimenting a little, I am
momentarily stymied by the fact that the way data is passed around
between Vim, the shell, ruby, the shell, and Vim again is a bit like
black magic to me just now. I'll have to get back to this later.
···
On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 09:52:52AM -0600, Chad Perrin wrote:
On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 11:40:28PM +0200, Joel Pearson wrote:
>
> Within that particular example, with an exact position:
> numstr[44..45] = (numstr[44..45].to_i + 3).to_s
Hmm.
My actual use case, as it happens, involves shelling out to Ruby from
Vim, and I do not at first glance see how this would fit into that
approach. Here's my original approach, as a Vim command:
Given the contents of the strings in question, the regex could be
simplified to /-?\d+/ because positives are never indicated by plus
signs.
Plus signs are rarely use, but since you did not mention this I wanted
to stay on the safe side.
This is a pretty good solution to the problem as I stated it,
but I unfortunately forgot to mention that sometimes some columns might
be empty -- so you get a blue ribbon for solving the problem I
described, even if it doesn't solve the problem I actually had to solve.
LOL
If arbitrary columns can be empty (i.e. empty strings), if whitespace
between columns does not have a fixed length and if integer values can
be arbitrary then there is no general solution to your problem because
the system cannot know which column you intend to change. I think you
need to impose at least one of these restrictions to be able to come
up with an automated solution.
Thanks for the ideas for how to write a better substitution routine than
I had. These may not actually work in this specific case, but it's
always instructive to see what approaches to solving problems come from
different perspectives.
That's absolutely true!
Kind regards
robert
···
On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 5:59 PM, Chad Perrin <code@apotheon.net> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 10:34:51AM +0200, Robert Klemme wrote:
To be precise, no *general* solution seems possible given the
restrictions imposed, though using split on /\b/ would have sufficed for
the one-off usage I needed at the time. I'd really like to have found
out there was a general solution, though, using some trick I had
overlooked.
I'd also like to have found out there was a way to pass multiple
parameters to the block for String#sub that would allow me to operate on
a pair of match captures, but the way String#sub works it only allows
one capture to be passed to the block as a parameter. I'm not really
sure why it was designed that way, unless there was some performance
constraint for the implementation.
···
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 02:09:53PM +0200, Robert Klemme wrote:
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:12 PM, Joel Pearson <lists@ruby-forum.com> wrote:
> How about
> numstr.split( /\b/ )
>
> => ["17", " ", "75", " -", "1", " ", "25", " -",
> "1", "
> ", "52", " ", "43", " ", "37", " ", "0"]
>
> Ok, at the moment it doesn't handle minuses correctly; but with a bit of
> work to iron that out, and with some rules on handling "empty" columns
> (are they padded with spaces or 0 length?), that might be a place to
> start.
That still does not work since it is based solely on a single line.
With columns optionally empty you cannot derive from a single line the
width of the whitespace separators. This is nothing which can be
solved by any amount of coding magic done with a single line. You
either need more lines or additional information which is fed into the
process. But information contained in a single line does not allow to
identify column positions properly.
>
> This is a pretty good solution to the problem as I stated it,
> but I unfortunately forgot to mention that sometimes some columns might
> be empty -- so you get a blue ribbon for solving the problem I
> described, even if it doesn't solve the problem I actually had to solve.
LOL
Yeah, that's pretty much the correct response to what I said.
If arbitrary columns can be empty (i.e. empty strings), if whitespace
between columns does not have a fixed length and if integer values can
be arbitrary then there is no general solution to your problem because
the system cannot know which column you intend to change. I think you
need to impose at least one of these restrictions to be able to come
up with an automated solution.
The columns are of fixed, but not uniform, width -- based on multiples
of four character width tab-stops, essentially, but using spaces instead
of tabs. Thus, the problem is basically confined to solutions that
operate on specific character columns (that is, the Nth character from
the left-hand margin).
···
On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 07:01:01PM +0200, Robert Klemme wrote:
On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 5:59 PM, Chad Perrin <code@apotheon.net> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 6:03 PM, Chad Perrin <code@apotheon.net> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 09:52:52AM -0600, Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 11:40:28PM +0200, Joel Pearson wrote:
> >
> > Within that particular example, with an exact position:
> > numstr[44..45] = (numstr[44..45].to_i + 3).to_s
>
> Hmm.
>
> My actual use case, as it happens, involves shelling out to Ruby from
> Vim, and I do not at first glance see how this would fit into that
> approach. Here's my original approach, as a Vim command:
>
> :.!ruby -pe 'sub(/(.{46})/) {|a| a.sub(/(..$)/) {|b| b.to_i + 3
}.to_s }'
>
> I'll have to come back to this after more caffeine and see if your
> approach can be made to fit without becoming uglier than what I ended up
> doing.
. . . and after thinking about this and experimenting a little, I am
momentarily stymied by the fact that the way data is passed around
between Vim, the shell, ruby, the shell, and Vim again is a bit like
black magic to me just now. I'll have to get back to this later.
>
> This is a pretty good solution to the problem as I stated it,
> but I unfortunately forgot to mention that sometimes some columns might
> be empty -- so you get a blue ribbon for solving the problem I
> described, even if it doesn't solve the problem I actually had to solve.
LOL
Yeah, that's pretty much the correct response to what I said.
If arbitrary columns can be empty (i.e. empty strings), if whitespace
between columns does not have a fixed length and if integer values can
be arbitrary then there is no general solution to your problem because
the system cannot know which column you intend to change. I think you
need to impose at least one of these restrictions to be able to come
up with an automated solution.
The columns are of fixed, but not uniform, width -- based on multiples
of four character width tab-stops, essentially, but using spaces instead
of tabs. Thus, the problem is basically confined to solutions that
operate on specific character columns (that is, the Nth character from
the left-hand margin).
If I understand you correctly then it is not possible to derive from a
single line how much spacing between two columns exists. Then I guess
there is no solution which can be applied by handing off a single line
from vim to ruby -pe. If you need that functionality more often, I
guess this warrants a full fledged Ruby script with proper inputs
which operates on the whole file.
Kind regards
robert
···
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:51 AM, Chad Perrin <code@apotheon.net> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 07:01:01PM +0200, Robert Klemme wrote:
On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 5:59 PM, Chad Perrin <code@apotheon.net> wrote:
>> >
>> > This is a pretty good solution to the problem as I stated it,
>> > but I unfortunately forgot to mention that sometimes some columns might
>> > be empty -- so you get a blue ribbon for solving the problem I
>> > described, even if it doesn't solve the problem I actually had to solve.
>>
>> LOL
>
> Yeah, that's pretty much the correct response to what I said.
>> If arbitrary columns can be empty (i.e. empty strings), if whitespace
>> between columns does not have a fixed length and if integer values can
>> be arbitrary then there is no general solution to your problem because
>> the system cannot know which column you intend to change. I think you
>> need to impose at least one of these restrictions to be able to come
>> up with an automated solution.
>
> The columns are of fixed, but not uniform, width -- based on multiples
> of four character width tab-stops, essentially, but using spaces instead
> of tabs. Thus, the problem is basically confined to solutions that
> operate on specific character columns (that is, the Nth character from
> the left-hand margin).
If I understand you correctly then it is not possible to derive from a
single line how much spacing between two columns exists. Then I guess
there is no solution which can be applied by handing off a single line
from vim to ruby -pe.
. . . except the solution I used, then shared here hoping there was
something more elegant, I suppose. It's not a general solution, but it
worked for the specific case in which I used it. I was just dismayed by
the uglitude of nesting a block-fed String#sub inside the block of
another String#sub.
If you need that functionality more often, I guess this warrants a
full fledged Ruby script with proper inputs which operates on the
whole file.
I guess so. C'est la vie.
···
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 10:23:37AM +0200, Robert Klemme wrote:
On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:51 AM, Chad Perrin <code@apotheon.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 07:01:01PM +0200, Robert Klemme wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 5:59 PM, Chad Perrin <code@apotheon.net> wrote:
