<no subject>

Ruby
1

Afternoon all,

I have a set of files that are downloaded via ftp which I iterate over
and
grab account numbers are their balances. I have been able to iterate
over
the individual lines and get my data however the account balances are
gather
by getting their specific position on current line and the position just
before the account balance is a “0” or a “-”, which indicates if the
balance
is a positive or a negative number.

My issue is what is the best way to have ruby indicate this float number
as
a negative number so when I compare account balances from the current
day
and the previous that the difference is calculated correctly?

Thanks in advance.
Tim

2

On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 9:48 PM, Tim W. [email protected] wrote:

My issue is what is the best way to have ruby indicate this float number as
a negative number so when I compare account balances from the current day
and the previous that the difference is calculated correctly?

Thanks in advance.
Tim

  1. It’s easier to help if you provide some samples from the data,
    together with expected results.
  2. Have a look at Regexp [1] and String#to_f
  3. You may want to use BigDecimal [2] instead of floats for money.
    floats are internally stored as binary fractions (obviously) so you
    might have problems with loosing tiny fractions of numbers.

[1] http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/tut_stdtypes.html#S4
[2] http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/bigdecimal/rdoc/index.html

3

On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 1:48 PM, Tim W. [email protected] wrote:

is a positive or a negative number.
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to_f

–
“Hey brother Christian with your high and mighty errand, Your actions
speak
so loud, I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

-Greg Graffin (Bad Religion)

4

On 21.04.2008 21:48, Tim W. wrote:

Afternoon all,

Good night.

I have a set of files that are downloaded via ftp which I iterate over and
grab account numbers are their balances. I have been able to iterate over
the individual lines and get my data however the account balances are gather
by getting their specific position on current line and the position just
before the account balance is a “0” or a “-”, which indicates if the balance
is a positive or a negative number.

My issue is what is the best way to have ruby indicate this float number as
a negative number so when I compare account balances from the current day
and the previous that the difference is calculated correctly?

Floats can be negative and positive. There is nothing extra you need to
do.

Note however that if you want correctness with currency values it is
better to use BigDecimal instead of Float because of the increased
exactness. Floats may be sufficient in your case but you should keep in
mind that there are some issues lurking.

Kind regards

robert