Skeets wrote:
> i'm sure this is easy, but i've gone through Pickaxe's string methods,
> searched the web and searched the groups, and i can't figure out how to
> do this in Ruby.
> 
> i grep a file and it returns the following string:
> 
> #ip 127.0.0.1
> 
> i now want to get rid of "#ip" so i can then strip the remaining string
> to get rid of spaces.
> 
> however, i can't find out how to delete the 3 leftmost characters - in
> this case "#ip".
> 
> thanks for any tips to get this done - i would think it is a matter of
> just knowing the correct method.
> 

If you do the grepping in Ruby you can do something like this:

ip = nil

File.foreach("foo.txt") do |line|
   ip = $1 if /^#ip\s+(\d+(?:\.\d+){3})/ =~ line
end

HTH

	robert