Ruby Phrasebook

Chapter 7. Manipulating Text

Of all the things Ruby does, it manipulates text the best. And why shouldn’t it? It’s great at working with pipes and gluing stuff together. The following code snippets give some good examples of places where text manipulation is critical for system administration.

Parsing an LDIF

current_entry = {}

all_entries = []

file = File.open 'test.ldif'


file.each_line do |line|

  if line[0,1] == ' ' or line[0,1] == "\t"

     current_entry[$1] += line.chomp[1..-1]

  else

  /(.+): (.+)/ =~ line

  if ( $1 == nil and $2 == nil )

     all_entries.push current_entry.dup unless current_entry =={}

     current_entry = {}

  else

   current_entry[$1] = $2

  end

 end

end

p all_entries

LDIF is a plain-text file format used to store information about an LDAP tree. LDIF ...