Rails split string with multiple parts

Question

I have a string that's been imported from a csv such as:

14th Aug 2009:1, 15th Aug 2009:1, 16th Sep 2015:1|Style1, 17th Sep 2015:1|Style 1

I wish to add this data to my database in a specific way. First I split it on , to get each date group (in this case 4 dates).

Secondly i'd like a way to split each of those date groups into multiple segments. The first with the date, second with the number after the colon and then a varied amount more for each of the items separated by the | character.

Is there an decent efficient way to accomplish this in Ruby?

Looking for outcome to be a hash like so:

{ '14th Aug 2009' => 1, '15th Aug 2009' => 1, '16th Aug 2009' => 1, '16th Sep 2015' => { 1 => 'Style 1' }, '17th Sep 2015' => { 1 => 'Style 1' }

Basically if the string was like so:

15th Aug 2009:1, 16th Sep 2015:3|Style1|Style 1, 17th Sep 2015:1|Style 1

I would get

{ '15th Aug 2009' => 1, '16th Sep 2015' => { '', 'Style 1', 'Style 1' }, '17th Sep 2015' => { 1 => 'Style 1' }

Basically, the text separated by |'s should be assigned to the number after the colon. If the number is 3 and there are two sets of text after it then one is an empty string and the other two will say the text (eg: "Style 1".

Sorry for sounding very confusing.

Can you give an example of what the output should be? What have you tried so far? — John La Rooy
– John La Rooy, Commented Mar 3, 2016 at 21:19
Your example output format is not valid: { '', 'Style 1', 'Style 1' }. Do you mean to use an array instead? Like: [ '', 'Style 1', 'Style 1' ]? — infused
– infused, Commented Mar 3, 2016 at 23:06
string.split(", ").each_with_object({}) { |line, hsh| k, *tokens = line.split(/:|\|/); hsh[k] = tokens } should do the trick — bjhaid
– bjhaid, Commented Mar 4, 2016 at 0:38

sammygadd · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-03 23:29:15Z

1

I'm assuming that you meant for the '|' separted items to build an Array, as infused asked about. How about this?

s ="15th Aug 2009:1, 16th Sep 2015:3|Style1|Style 1, 17th Sep 2015:1|Style 1"
result = {}
s.split(',').each do |v|
  date,rest = v.split(':')
  items = rest.split('|')
  if items[0] == "1"
    result[date] = 1 
  else
    result[date] = ['', items[1..-1]]
  end
end

answered Mar 3, 2016 at 23:29

sammygadd

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2 Comments

rctneil Over a year ago

This looks good so far. I'll give it a go tonight. I'll need to tweak it to create appropriate records in my DB but I can see the general idea. Thanks. Could you explain further about what this line is doing? result[date] = ['', items[1..-1]]

rctneil Over a year ago

Much appreciate this. I modified it to create the required records in my database that I needed and then extended it further with more required functionality. Thanks for giving me a great starting point and to get me going on resolving this!

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