# Parsing text files

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/parsing-text-files/114397>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [September 12, 2007, 8:43am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/parsing-text-files/114397 "2007-09-12T08:43:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Christian\_WattengSS](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/ed655f/32.png) [@Christian\_WattengSS](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Christian_WattengSS)\
**Post date:** [September 12, 2007, 8:43am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/parsing-text-files/114397/1 "2007-09-12T08:43:18Z")

</div>

## I have some textfiles with about the following format

## Lorem ipsum|And so on|And on|And on 5|3|4|77|2|3|5 More lorem|And more ipsum|And so forth

Just several more lines 🙂

What would be the easiest way to parse these files? Just iterate line  
by line and regex-split on “|”?  
There are also some of the files that might have the number 5 on line  
3 (for example) which means that there will be 5 “blocks” of  
information (spanning say 3 lines per block), starting with line 4…

Any suggestions?

Christian…

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Christian\_WattengSS](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/ed655f/32.png) [@Christian\_WattengSS](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Christian_WattengSS)\
**Post date:** [September 12, 2007, 1:57pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/parsing-text-files/114397/2 "2007-09-12T13:57:19Z")

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Hi Christian,

So you have 2 formats to parse: a single-line format and a multi-line  
format. It sounds like you could just use String.split for the single  
line  
format:

data = line.split(‘|’)

after which, data will be an array with an element for each column. For  
line 2 of your example below, the array would be [5, 3, 4, 77, 2, 3, 5].  
See here for more info on split:  
[class String - RDoc Documentation](http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/String.html#M000818).

For the second format, how do you know the number of lines each block  
will  
span?

-Dan

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Christian\_WattengSS](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/ed655f/32.png) [@Christian\_WattengSS](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Christian_WattengSS)\
**Post date:** [September 12, 2007, 5:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/parsing-text-files/114397/3 "2007-09-12T17:17:59Z")

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Yes I thought the simplest ones would be simple 😉

## The number of lines is a constant, if there is no info in a line, there is just a newline there. So a 4 line block could look like this

Line1  
Line2

## Line4

Christian…

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Christian\_WattengSS](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/ed655f/32.png) [@Christian\_WattengSS](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Christian_WattengSS)\
**Post date:** [September 12, 2007, 6:48pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/parsing-text-files/114397/4 "2007-09-12T18:48:29Z")

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From your original email:

> There are also some of the files that might have the number 5 on line  
> 3 (for example) which means that there will be 5 “blocks” of  
> information (spanning say 3 lines per block), starting with line 4.

Does the 5 mean 5 “blocks” of information, or 5 lines of information?  
I’ll  
assume 5 lines for now, let me know if that’s incorrect.

This isn’t the prettiest code, but it should work:

in\_block = false  
count = 0  
max = nil  
open(file).each do |line|  
if in\_block  
# do something with the next line in the block, could add it to an  
array, etc…  
# update block counters  
count = count + 1  
in\_block = false if count == max # exit block if necessary, could  
process the block now  
next  
end  
if line =~ /\d+$/  
# entering a block  
count = 1  
max = line.strip.to\_i  
in\_block = true  
else  
# parse a regular line  
data = line.split(’|’)  
# do something with the line data here…  
end  
end

-Dan