Skip to main content

First success and failure with Ruby program (ruby pt.3)

So if you haven't been keeping up I'm trying to write my first Ruby program to teach myself the ruby programming language. I coded in BASIC in high school and did a little C coding in college. Since then I've put that part of my brain to sleep with a diet of fruit loops and Keebler elf cookies. The program I'm writing takes a text file and reverses the order of the characters (in Hebrew) but not the order of the lines.

So status update: I got my program running this morning. Yesterday as I was going to bed (after the smoke detector woke me up -- long story tell you later) I picked up my ruby book and had an idea.

This morning I put it together. And now the program works (sort-of, but more on that later). It searches the directory for files that need to be reversed, reverses each line in order and outputs a file! Yay! But alas like many programming victories it was Pyrrhic.

And here is the failure (which I was expecting) it mangles Hebrew. Here is the input and outputted files:

This sucks quite a bit since my research shows that the method reverse! I'm using is the culprit. Ruby assumes you're using ANSI text. Why? Are we in the 386 era again? Wasn't this written by a Japanese guy? It seems to be a memory issue. ANSI text is 8-bytes (or bits?) while Unicode is 16-bytes (or bits, I don't remember which at the moment). So ANSI text occupies half the memory that Unicode does. However, this is Beautiful Sunshine (or B.S. for short) because Java uses Unicode. Ok so now to find how to handle Unicode in Ruby. [ed. Unicode is 2 bytes or 16 bits, ANSI is 1 byte or 8 bits]

But first the overview of how the program works. The program has three parts now.

  1. It goes fetch the files it needs to reverse (in order!) and puts the whole file contents on variable text.
  2. It goes through each line of the text and reverses it then appends each line (one at a time) to the output variable (which is outside the loop so it remains after this is done).
    3. 1st part
  3. Writes the output variable to a file.



All good except step two. Which I'll have to figure out how to do differently.

2nd part
3rd part

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Fake Resume

Inspired by the over aggrandized bio of Joseph Rakofsky I want to write my own. If you don't know who he is; Joseph Rakofsky is a lawyer who earned a mistrial for a criminal client due to his (alleged) incompetence as reported on the Washington Post . There has been quite a few commentaries on his "Streisand-house" approach of suing all the bloggers and even the Washington Post and American Bar Association for reporting his (alleged) ineptitude. ("Streisand-house" is what happened to Barbara Streisand who wanted to have a picture of her mansion removed from the internet and she sued to have it removed. Unfortunately suing requires the filing of public documents with a picture of her house. The lawsuit had the direct opposite effect it intended. Everybody now could see legally, since it was a public document, a picture of her house.) But all that internet gossip aside I'm most impressed by his resume. Here is a quote from the website: Prior t...
1 comment
Read more

What Medieval Economics can teach us about tariffs.

As a teen, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) with my friends. This started an interest in the medieval period that led to me taking a medieval history class in college just to understand the period more. Over the years I've also read great books like " Dungeon, Fire and Sword " about the crusades (I recommend the book) and yet with all that knowledge it wasn't until recently that it occurred to me I had a completely wrong understanding of economics in the Medieval Period. "Viking helmets, sword and footwear" by eltpics is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 In my D&D games, players who are adventures battling monsters and creatures would need equipment and on the trips to town, they'd get resupplied with their adventuring necessities. I'd run these moments referencing my imagination of what it must have been and fantasy books I'd read. There be an inn with a raucous bar, a gruffly black-smith, if a city also a weapon and armor sm...
Post a Comment
Read more

Building my own home.

I've decided. I want to build my own home. There is something special about building your own things. I built a desk for my tiny room when I first moved to L.A. My room was so small that I had to sit on the bed to use the computer so I build a high desk so I could sit on the bed and work on the computer. My roommate Trentity helped me cut the ply-wood to the right side. I still have that desk. It now sits on the living room covered by a cloth hiding the surplus of costume parts my current roommate Sean uses in his creations. Learning to build and fix things continue. And the feeling of satisfaction from fixing even small things is great. So a few years ago I heard on the NPR program the Story about a couple of educators that moved to a tent in their back-yard so they could rent their house and afford to send their kids to college. They had a special type of tent called a yurt and cooked and showered in an RV they had parked next to it. I thought I could do that. Housing in Lo...
2 comments
Read more