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On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 11:29 AM, Robert Klemme
<shortcutter / googlemail.com>wrote:

> 2010/3/18 Shiny Hydra <slotriof / guerrillamailblock.com>:
> >> So your file has fixed width records?  This is important to know,
> >> otherwise approach 2 from below becomes tricky (you basically need to
> >> read line by line in order to find the proper position whereas you
> >> otherwise can calculate the position via record size).
> >
> > Yes, the records are all fixed width.  The width of the file is based on
> > the extension type.
> >
> >> Btw, is there a particular reason why you create what looks like a
> >> relational database based on text files?
> >
> > I'm working off of a standard format that has been used for years
> > (called Mail.dat).  Editing the files has been an extremely time
> > consuming process, so I'm trying to write an automated script to batch
> > replace specific parameters.  After doing some research, it seemed like
> > Ruby was a great language to learn for this type of text manipulation
> > and it turned out to be quite fun to boot.
>
> That's good!  I hope you continue to enjoy your journey.
>
> > I'm currently working through the book Beginning Ruby: From Novice to
> > Professional, but it does not go very in depth on text file manipulation
> > techniques.  I tried looking through the classes and methods online, but
> > without a strong foundation in the language it's difficult to navigate
> > that amount of information.  If you could provide any additional
> > information it would be immensely helpful.
>
> You could start with searching the archives of ruby-talk for "File"
> and "seek".  That should give you some bits of code which deal with
> file IO different from sequentially reading or writing.
>
> Kind regards
>
> robert
>
> --
> remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end
> http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/
>
>
This got me excited, my file manipulation isn't very good, so thought I'd
give it a try. Here is what I got http://gist.github.com/336838

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