Picking through a script

Ruby
1

Hello Ruby Forum,

I’m picking through a script that will archive sent messages in my
Dialog newsreader, written by another. He included msgfile.rb, which
looks to be a class definition. Am I correct that ruby should throw an
error if it can’t find iconv? As it is, the script seems to execute
without output, warnings or errors.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

extr_sent.rb

extract all Sent messgages from all msg*.dat in Dialog’s data

direectory into single messages

Usage: place into data dir and run - will extract into single messages

with parameter -m: extracts to mbox

with parameter -r: extracts raw, mostly for debugging purposes

Backup your files first, no guarantees.

require ‘iconv’
require ‘msgfile’

Is iconv something that comes already with ruby 1.8.6? Thanks,

2

On Sunday 08 June 2008 23:34:09 Gerry F. wrote:

Is iconv something that comes already with ruby 1.8.6?

Seems to. For what it’s worth, isn’t 1.8.7 out now?

3

David M. wrote:

On Sunday 08 June 2008 23:34:09 Gerry F. wrote:

Is iconv something that comes already with ruby 1.8.6?

Seems to. For what it’s worth, isn’t 1.8.7 out now?

I’ve had this install for a while. Ruby was something I wanted to get
to, but real life has been interfering. I might be behind one version.

Since you said you got it to work, I went ahead and looked for anything
in ruby that had iconv in it. There was an iconv.dll and an iconv.exe.
I’d guess ruby.exe used iconv.dll.

Here’s some more of the script:

RAW = ARGV.delete("-r")
MBX = ARGV.delete("-m")

def output(art, counter)
if RAW
File.open(filename(counter), “wb”) {|out| out.puts art}
else
if MBX
File.open(“sent.mbx”, “ab”) do |out|
out.print fromline(counter), LINEBREAK
out.print reformat(art), LINEBREAK, LINEBREAK
end
else
File.open(filename(counter), “wb”) {|out| out.print reformat(art),
LINEBREAK}
end
end
end

It looks like ARG.delete is a way to get command line args. How would
this behave if no command-line args are given?

4

On Monday 09 June 2008 04:24:25 Gerry F. wrote:

It looks like ARG.delete is a way to get command line args. How would
this behave if no command-line args are given?

Well, ARGV is an array of commandline arguments – it behaves exactly
like any
other array. A little testing shows that calling delete from an array
will
either return the item asked for, or nil.

So in this case, RAW will be either ‘-r’ or nil, depending on whether
there’s
a -r in the commandline. Same for MBX and ‘-m’ – so with no commandline
arguments, RAW and MBX will both be nil.