Assume, i got the following file (input.txt):
name = "Peter"
age = 26
family_status = married
Mentioned lines can be stored in a random order, lie:
family_status = married
name = "Peter"
age = 26
In my program I also have variables family_status, age and name. How do I in a single cycle read those lines from file and assign correspond variables with the values?
Setting Variables
This depends on several facts.
- What kind of variables do you have (local variables, instance variables, class variables, or global variables)
- What kind of type is family_status (
String,
Symbol
, whatever)
I assume you are using instance variables for this:
def read_vars(io, vars)
io.each do |line|
# ensure the line has the right format (name = var)
raise "wrong format" unless line=~ /^\s*(\w+)\s*=\s*"?(.*?)"?\s+$/
var= :"@#{$1}"
# pick the type of the data
value= case vars[var]
when String
$2
when Integer
$2.to_i
when Symbol
$2.to_sym
else
raise "invalid var"
end
instance_variable_set(var, value)
end
end
read_vars(File.read("input.txt", :@age => Integer, :@name => String, :@family_status => Symbol )
If you are not using instance variables you have to change the instacne_variable_set
and var= :"@...
line to you needs. This code has the following advantages:
- You control which variables can be set
- You control which types these variables have
- You can easily add new variables and/or change types of variables without changing the read code
- You can use this code to read entirely different files, without writing new code for it
reading as YAML
If your needs are not as specific as in your question I would go an entirely different approach to this.
I would write the input.txt
as a yaml file. In yaml syntax it would look like this:
---
name: Peter
age: 26
family_status: :married
You can read it with:
YAML.load(File.read("input.txt")) # => {"name" => "Peter", "age" => 26, "family_status" => :married }
Be carefull if you don't control the input.txt
file, you don't control which types the data will have. I would name the file input.yaml
instead of input.txt
. If you want to know more, about how to write yaml files have a look at: http://yaml.kwiki.org/?YamlInFiveMinutes. More infos about yaml and ruby can be found at http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/yaml/rdoc/index.html.
Assuming the file is really as regular as your example, you can slurp everything into a nice hash like this:
input = IO.read("input.txt")
input_hash = Hash[*input.gsub(/"/,"").split(/\s*[\n=]\s*/)]
That gives you:
=> {"name"=>"Peter", "family_status"=>"married", "age"=>"26"}
But then you're really going to need some variable-specific code to do whatever type-handling you want, particularly for whatever family_status is...
You can try this. Not pretty on a single line though:
class Test
attr_accessor :name, :age, :family_status
def load
File.foreach('input.txt') do |line|
match = line.match /^(\S+)\s*=\s*"?(\S+?)"?\s*$/
self.send("#{match[1]}=", match[2]) if match
end
end
end
test = Test.new
test.load