Thursday, August 11, 2005

Ruby

So yeah came across this while browsing why's site. Very cool. I hadn't been put into a situation where I needed to match the same thing on multiple lines (what with the nature of directory based information). But still this is damn cool. Give a regular expression to a string#scan and get back all the matching elements.

Means I can slurp in an entire file and pick out the bits I want. Memory overhead goes down the drain, but still for quick snatch-and-grabs, that has be the coolest thing.

re = /pattern./
STDIN.readlines.join("").scan(re)

too cool.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If you don't want to load the entire file and scan, you can use IO.grep:

STDIN.grep( /pattern./ ) do |line|
puts line
end

Prints out each line which has a match. Doesn't work for multiline searches, but it's another option. You're right, though, scan is a good one.

Thanks for reading! Beaver tales!