On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 9:48 PM, Tim Wolak <twolak / sktydev.com> wrote:
>
>  Afternoon all,
>
>  I have a set of files that are downloaded via ftp which I iterate over and
>  grab account numbers are their balances.  I have been able to iterate over
>  the individual lines and get my data however the account balances are gather
>  by getting their specific position on current line and the position just
>  before the account balance is a "0" or a "-", which indicates if the balance
>  is a positive or a negative number.
>
>  My issue is what is the best way to have ruby indicate this float number as
>  a negative number so when I compare account balances from the current day
>  and the previous that the difference is calculated correctly?
>
>  Thanks in advance.
>  Tim

1. It's easier to help if you provide some samples from the data,
together with expected results.
2. Have a look at Regexp [1] and String#to_f
3. You may want to use BigDecimal [2] instead of floats for money.
floats are internally stored as binary fractions (obviously) so you
might have problems with loosing tiny fractions of numbers.

[1] http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/tut_stdtypes.html#S4
[2] http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/bigdecimal/rdoc/index.html