January 29th, 2006
When Code Flows Like Poetry
It’s not always that you get to solve complex problems. Many a time you need to implement something—something that you know is silly enough. How do you feel? Bored, I know. However, there’s small amount of joy you get when the “tool” you use lets you be creative. (Of course, there’s a distinction between the larger problem at hand and the smallest implementable part of it; it is the typically joyless implementation of this small part that I’m talking about.)
I had a situation where I had to read a data file that had on each line data like thus:
foo:bar
Obviously, you want to hold all that data in a hash. Implementing this in a typical programming language would, in pseudocode, look something like thus:
data = file("data.txt").read
hsh = {}
foreach line in data do
k, v = line.split(":")
hsh["k"] = v
end
Simple enough, but boring too. With Ruby, I can play:
hsh = Hash.new
File.open("test.txt").readlines.each { |line|
hsh = hsh.update(Hash[ *line.split(":").
map { |ele| ele = ele.match(/(.*)\n/)[1] rescue ele }
])
}
The Ruby code flows like poetry. Literally. There’s an extremely elegant solution, like why pointed out to me:
Hash[*IO.read('test.txt').scan(/^(.+?):(.*)/).flatten]
But then I’d say there are no blocks there. :-)
There are many such Ruby gems scattered all around. I’ll point you to some of them I found on RedHanded:
Go use a better tool, if you can.
