I have some textfiles with about the following format
Hi Christian,
So you have 2 formats to parse: a single-line format and a multi-line format. It sounds like you could just use String.split for the single line format:
data = line.split(‘|’)
after which, data will be an array with an element for each column. For line 2 of your example below, the array would be [5, 3, 4, 77, 2, 3, 5]. See here for more info on split: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/String.html#M000818.
For the second format, how do you know the number of lines each block will span?
-Dan
Yes I thought the simplest ones would be simple 
The number of lines is a constant, if there is no info in a line, there is just a newline there. So a 4 line block could look like this
From your original email:
There are also some of the files that might have the number 5 on line 3 (for example) which means that there will be 5 “blocks” of information (spanning say 3 lines per block), starting with line 4.
Does the 5 mean 5 “blocks” of information, or 5 lines of information? I’ll assume 5 lines for now, let me know if that’s incorrect.
This isn’t the prettiest code, but it should work:
in_block = false count = 0 max = nil open(file).each do |line| if in_block # do something with the next line in the block, could add it to an array, etc… # update block counters count = count + 1
in_block = false if count == max # exit block if necessary, could process the block now
next
end if line =~ /\d+$/ # entering a block count = 1 max = line.strip.to_i in_block = true
else # parse a regular line data = line.split(‘|’) # do something with the line data here… end end
-Dan
