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Ruby Programming
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Pattern-Based Substitution

Sometimes finding a pattern in a string is good enough. If a friend challenges you to find a word that contains the letters a, b, c, d, and e in order, you could search a word list with the pattern /a.*b.*c.*d.*e/ and find ``absconded'' and ``ambuscade.'' That has to be worth something.

However, there are times when you need to change things based on a pattern match. Let's go back to our song list file. Whoever created it entered all the artists' names in lowercase. When we display them on our jukebox's screen, they'd look better in mixed case. How can we change the first character of each word to uppercase?

The methods String#sub and String#gsub look for a portion of a string matching their first argument and replace it with their second argument. String#sub performs one replacement, while String#gsub replaces every occurrence of the match. Both routines return a new copy of the String containing the substitutions. Mutator versions String#sub! and String#gsub! modify the original string.

a = "the quick brown fox"
a.sub(/[aeiou]/,  '*') "th* quick brown fox"
a.gsub(/[aeiou]/, '*') "th* q**ck br*wn f*x"
a.sub(/\s\S+/,  '') "the brown fox"
a.gsub(/\s\S+/, '') "the"

The second argument to both functions can be either a String or a block. If a block is used, the block's value is substituted into the String.

a = "the quick brown fox"
a.sub(/^./) { $&.upcase } "The quick brown fox"
a.gsub(/[aeiou]/) { $&.upcase } "thE qUIck brOwn fOx"

So, this looks like the answer to converting our artists' names. The pattern that matches the first character of a word is \b\w---look for a word boundary followed by a word character. Combine this with gsub and we can hack the artists' names.

def mixedCase(aName)
  aName.gsub(/\b\w/) { $&.upcase }
end
mixedCase("fats waller") "Fats Waller"
mixedCase("louis armstrong") "Louis Armstrong"
mixedCase("strength in numbers") "Strength In Numbers"

Ruby Programming
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