Split a string at tab positions

Ruby
1

Hi

I am a newbie to ruby and when i tried to split a string at tab
positions, it didnt work. Could you please tell me where I am going
wrong? Code is pasted.

#!/usr/bin/ruby1.9
s = “a b”
ss = s.split(’\t’)
puts ss[0]

It just prints the entire line without splitting…

suresh

2

first, you should use double quote when you want to escape a character.

s = “a\tb”
=> “a\tb”
ss = s.split(“\t”)
=> [“a”, “b”]

2008/5/30, suresh [email protected]:

3

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 5:19 PM, suresh [email protected]
wrote:

#!/usr/bin/ruby1.9
s = “a b”
ss = s.split(‘\t’)
puts ss[0]
It just prints the entire line without splitting…

probably your editor is converting the tab to spaces.

try eg,

s=“a\tb”
#=> “a\tb”
ss=s.split “\t”
#=> [“a”, “b”]

kind regards -botp

4

Hi,

ss = s.split(‘\t’)

Regexes take the form /…/ (see
class Regexp - RDoc Documentation)

“a b c”.split(/\t/) # tabs between the letters!

does what you want.

So long … Stefan

5

On May 30, 5:28 am, Oscar Del B. [email protected] wrote:

2008/5/30, suresh [email protected]:

s = “a b”
ss = s.split(‘\t’)
puts ss[0]

It just prints the entire line without splitting…

suresh

Thank you both. It was the double quote issue…when i gave split “\t”
it came correctly…difficulties of a C++ programmer !!!

6

Stefan Kraemer wrote:

So long … Stefan

I think his piece of code also works - in my mind, the problem is the
single quotes surrounding the \t. I’ve just got done with processing
lots of delimited data and went through the same frustration. ‘,’ would
work but ‘\t’ wouldn’t! :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Mohit.
6/3/2008 | 12:26 AM.

7

suresh wrote:

It just prints the entire line without splitting…

suresh

The problem is the ‘\t’ - anything inside single quotes is not touched
by Ruby. It needs to be “\t” (double quotes) for it to be interpreted
as a tab character by Ruby.

In my mind, this is the #1 problem that C programmers have in Ruby - it
just seems natural to split at a character \t and C programmers (incl
me) write it as ‘\t’.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Mohit.
6/3/2008 | 12:24 AM.