On Apr 9, 2006, at 8:45 AM, Albert Vernon Smith wrote:

> Coming from Perl, I often rely upon auto-vivification, so I needed  
> to figure out how to work around this.  Perhaps there are improved  
> ways of going about this, and I'd appreciate any feedback on how to  
> go about it better.

Your code looks very clean to me!  A minor thing I noticed is that  
you could simplify:

   .gsub(/[\"\(\)]/,"")

to:

   .delete('"()')

Can you show an example using Perl's auto-vivification that feels  
funny in Ruby?  Perhaps we would have better ideas after seeing it...

Thanks for the submission!

James Edward Gray II