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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Wed, 15 Jun 2016

Using Ruby to delete blocks of text across multiple lines

I tend to learn things in programming when I have a problem to solve. This is just such a case.

I was working with a huge XML file, and I needed to trim elements out of it that begin with <generic tag> and end with </generic tag>, and include a random amount of text and other tags, across multiple lines, in between.

At first I tried using the Nokogiri gem, but it just wasn't happening. I was working on my Election Results script, and ... the election -- they hold it on a certain date, you know.

I would have to brute-force it. Like I always do.

My whole idea this cycle was to dump my giant sed hack from elections past and use mostly (if not all) Ruby to parse the XML I get from the state of California and provide the JSON output my fellow dev needed for the front end. (I also have a ton of fixed-width ASCII from Los Angeles County to deal with, as well as scraped HTML from San Bernardino County, but those are other tales for other times.)

With the state data, I had the XML-to-JSON conversion covered with Ruby's Crack gem. But I just couldn't pare down the XML to make the JSON a manageable size.

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Posted: Jun 15, 2016 10:40pm UTC

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Category: /programming/ruby/

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A great Ruby loops tutorial from Prograils

A company called Prograils offers a great tutorial, Loops in Ruby - all possible approaches.

It looks like a good reference for when you're writing a Ruby program and need to figure out which kind of loop will work best in a particular situation.

Posted: Jun 15, 2016 6:37pm UTC

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Category: /programming/ruby/

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