What's the Ruby way to do this?

ruby-talk
1

Lähettäjä: Florian Gross <flgr@ccan.de>
Aihe: Re: what's the Ruby way to do this?

William James wrote:

> "If you have never worked with regular expressions before,
> they probably look anything but regular".
>
> How true that is! I am not as familiar with Ruby-style
> regular expressions as I would like to be, since I've done
> much more programming in Awk, which has less powerful ones.
> I see now that I could have made it shorter (and I wouldn't
> be surprised if Florian Gross could make it "yet shorter"):
>
> def snippet(thought)
> thought.match(/(\S+(\s+|$)){0,10}/)[0]+($'>""?"...":"")
> end

Let's try then:

def snippet(thought)
   result = thought.clone
   result[/^(?:\S*\s+){9}\S*(.+)$/, 1] = "..."
ensure
   return result
end

def snippet(thought)
   thought.sub(/^((?:\S*\s+){9}\S*)(.+)$/, '\1...')
end

But actually I still prefer the solution I gave earlier. Regexps are
harder to understand than the equivalent code and gain you little in
this case. (Even if you know them, there's still some advanced trickery
involved in our pieces of code.)

Many things could be considered the 'Ruby Way', but none moreso than
messing with the standard library :slight_smile:

class String
  # snippet / Method
  # -- Shows the first N words of the String with a continuation.
  def snippet(words = 10, continuation = '...')
    ary = self.split[0...words]
    ary[words - 1] << continuation if ary[words]
    ary.join(' ')
  end
end

p "I just finished reading Dan Simmons' Iliad, it was very good.".snippet
# => I just finished reading Dan Simmons' Iliad, it was very...
p "I just finished reading Dan Simmons' Iliad, it was very good.".snippet(3)
# => I just finished...
p "I just finished reading Dan Simmons' Iliad, it was very good.".snippet(10, "...\n<a href="/articles/23">Read more...</a>")
# => I just finished reading Dan Simmons' Iliad, it was very...
     <a href="/articles/23">Read more...</a>

E