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Ruby Programming
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Working with Strings

String is probably the largest built-in Ruby class, with over 75 standard methods. We won't go through them all here; the library reference has a complete list. Instead, we'll look at some common string idioms---things that are likely to pop up during day-to-day programming.

Let's get back to our jukebox. Although it's designed to be connected to the Internet, it also holds copies of some popular songs on a local hard drive. That way, if a squirrel chews through our 'net connection we'll still be able to entertain the customers.

For historical reasons (are there any other kind?), the list of songs is stored as rows in a flat file. Each row holds the name of the file containing the song, the song's duration, the artist, and the title, all in vertical-bar-separated fields. A typical file might start:

/jazz/j00132.mp3  | 3:45 | Fats     Waller     | Ain't Misbehavin'
/jazz/j00319.mp3  | 2:58 | Louis    Armstrong  | Wonderful World
/bgrass/bg0732.mp3| 4:09 | Strength in Numbers | Texas Red
         :                  :           :                   :

Looking at the data, it's clear that we'll be using some of class String's many methods to extract and clean up the fields before we create Song objects based on them. At a minimum, we'll need to:

  • break the line into fields,
  • convert the running time from mm:ss to seconds, and
  • remove those extra spaces from the artist's name.

Our first task is to split each line into fields, and String#split will do the job nicely. In this case, we'll pass split a regular expression, /\s*\|\s*/, which splits the line into tokens wherever split finds a vertical bar, optionally surrounded by spaces. And, because the line read from the file has a trailing newline, we'll use String#chomp to strip it off just before we apply the split.

songs = SongList.new

songFile.each do |line|   file, length, name, title = line.chomp.split(/\s*\|\s*/)   songs.append Song.new(title, name, length) end puts songs[1]
produces:
Song: Wonderful World--Louis    Armstrong (2:58)

Unfortunately, whoever created the original file entered the artists' names in columns, so some of them contain extra spaces. These will look ugly on our high-tech, super-twist, flat-panel Day-Glo display, so we'd better remove these extra spaces before we go much further. There are many ways of doing this, but probably the simplest is String#squeeze , which trims runs of repeated characters. We'll use the squeeze! form of the method, which alters the string in place.

songs = SongList.new

songFile.each do |line|   file, length, name, title = line.chomp.split(/\s*\|\s*/)   name.squeeze!(" ")   songs.append Song.new(title, name, length) end puts songs[1]
produces:
Song: Wonderful World--Louis Armstrong (2:58)

Finally, there's the minor matter of the time format: the file says 2:58, and we want the number of seconds, 178. We could use split again, this time splitting the time field around the colon character.

mins, secs = length.split(/:/)

Instead, we'll use a related method. String#scan is similar to split in that it breaks a string into chunks based on a pattern. However, unlike split, with scan you specify the pattern that you want the chunks to match. In this case, we want to match one or more digits for both the minutes and seconds component. The pattern for one or more digits is /\d+/.

songs = SongList.new
songFile.each do |line|
  file, length, name, title = line.chomp.split(/\s*\|\s*/)
  name.squeeze!(" ")
  mins, secs = length.scan(/\d+/)
  songs.append Song.new(title, name, mins.to_i*60+secs.to_i)
end
puts songs[1]
produces:
Song: Wonderful World--Louis Armstrong (178)

Our jukebox has a keyword search capability. Given a word from a song title or an artist's name, it will list all matching tracks. Type in ``fats,'' and it might come back with songs by Fats Domino, Fats Navarro, and Fats Waller, for example. We'll implement this by creating an indexing class. Feed it an object and some strings, and it will index that object under every word (of two or more characters) that occurs in those strings. This will illustrate a few more of class String's many methods.

class WordIndex
  def initialize
    @index = Hash.new(nil)
  end
  def index(anObject, *phrases)
    phrases.each do |aPhrase|
      aPhrase.scan /\w[-\w']+/ do |aWord|   # extract each word
        aWord.downcase!
        @index[aWord] = [] if @index[aWord].nil?
        @index[aWord].push(anObject)
      end
    end
  end
  def lookup(aWord)
    @index[aWord.downcase]
  end
end

The String#scan method extracts elements from a string that match a regular expression. In this case, the pattern ``\w[-\w']+'' matches any character that can appear in a word, followed by one or more of the things specified in the brackets (a hyphen, another word character, or a single quote). We'll talk more about regular expressions beginning on page 56. To make our searches case insensitive, we map both the words we extract and the words used as keys during the lookup to lowercase. Note the exclamation mark at the end of the first downcase! method name. As with the squeeze! method we used previously, this is an indication that the method will modify the receiver in place, in this case converting the string to lowercase.[There's a minor bug in this code example: the song ``Gone, Gone, Gone'' would get indexed three times. Can you come up with a fix?]

We'll extend our SongList class to index songs as they're added, and add a method to look up a song given a word.

class SongList
  def initialize
    @songs = Array.new
    @index = WordIndex.new
  end
  def append(aSong)
    @songs.push(aSong)
    @index.index(aSong, aSong.name, aSong.artist)
    self
  end
  def lookup(aWord)
    @index.lookup(aWord)
  end
end

Finally, we'll test it all.

songs = SongList.new
songFile.each do |line|
  file, length, name, title = line.chomp.split(/\s*\|\s*/)
  name.squeeze!(" ")
  mins, secs = length.scan(/\d+/)
  songs.append Song.new(title, name, mins.to_i*60+secs.to_i)
end
puts songs.lookup("Fats")
puts songs.lookup("ain't")
puts songs.lookup("RED")
puts songs.lookup("WoRlD")
produces:
Song: Ain't Misbehavin'--Fats Waller (225)
Song: Ain't Misbehavin'--Fats Waller (225)
Song: Texas Red--Strength in Numbers (249)
Song: Wonderful World--Louis Armstrong (178)

We could spend the next 50 pages looking at all the methods in class String. However, let's move on instead to look at a simpler datatype: ranges.
Ruby Programming
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