Input and Output files in Ruby

[Zane]

Basically i've tried to do some research on this but I can't seem to get anything that is working in Sketchup so I really need your help guys, here is the problem i'm having:

I have a text file in my documents which contain three numbers (they can either be seperated by spaces or by /n) and I want to have ruby read that file in line by line, storing each line as a new variable, the first variable being depth, the second being width and the third being length.

Do you guys think you can help? I can show you what I mean in C++ if that helps:

ifstream input("My Documents\\slabout.text");
input >> depth >> width >> length
input.close();

Thank you for your help!

[Jim]

Hi Zane,

You may want to check out Dan's reading a CSV file post.

But in short and ignoring Exceptions and namespace issues, the core code might be similar to...

# lines will reference a String including newlines.
lines = IO.read("My Documents\\slabout.text")
width, depth, height = lines.split("\n")

Then, you will probably need to convert the values to Floats or Integers to make them useful...

width = width.to_f
...

Or reading each line..

IO.foreach("My Documents\\slabout.text") do |line|
  # do something with line variable (String)
end

[Zane]

That's fantastic Jim, thanks!

I just happened to stumble across something similar where I can use IO.readlines and arrays to sort out the writing in lines one by one.

[Jim]

Just another thought (while browsing around the forums..)

depth = width = length = nil
File.open("My Documents\\slabout.text") { |fp|   
  depth, width, length = fp.gets, fp.gets, fp.gets
}