Month: July 2012

Here I am writing about the ruby scan method for string.

syntax: scan(pattern) => array

Take a string name, where

irb> name = "Viswanathan Anand"

You scan through the string for words by,

ruby-1.9.2-p290 :014 > name.scan(/\w+/)
 => ["Viswanathan", "Anand"] 

scan for 3 letters and make them an array element,

ruby-1.9.2-p290 :015 > name.scan(/.../)
 => ["Vis", "wan", "ath", "an ", "Ana"] 

scan for 3 letters and group them with an array and make them array element,

ruby-1.9.2-p290 :016 > name.scan(/(...)/)
 => [["Vis"], ["wan"], ["ath"], ["an "], ["Ana"]]

and you can make three two pair letters in an array like:

ruby-1.9.2-p290 :017 > name.scan(/(...)(...)/)
 => [["Vis", "wan"], ["ath", "an "]]

You can also use reg exp like,

ruby-1.9.2-p290 :018 > name.scan(/[A-Z][a-z]+/)
 => ["Viswanathan", "Anand"]

Suppose you want a hash with keys from an array and values from another array, use something like

ruby> ids = [1,2,3,4]
 => [1, 2, 3, 4]
ruby> names = ['Dan Brown', 'Stella', 'Parker']
=> ["Dan Brown", "Stella", "Parker"]

ruby> Hash[ids.zip names]
=> {1=>"Dan Brown", 2=>"Stella", 3=>"Parker", 4=>nil}