Eloquent Ruby

Chapter 4. Take Advantage of Ruby’s Smart Strings

Ask a nonprogrammer what we software types do all day and their answer will probably involve numbers. It’s true: Programs are often knee deep in numerical values, everything from account balances to the number of milliseconds it takes to store a balance in a database. It ain’t called computing for nothing. The thing that non-coders don’t realize is just how much text processing goes on alongside all the number-crunching. Real-world programs tend to overflow with text, everything from the name of the account owner, to the name of the table that stores the balance, to the name of the program doing the storing. Because text processing is so central to just about every programming problem, every ...