Charming ruby with curses

The other day I did something good. I fished out my Programming Ruby book and skimmed through it. I found many interesting things there, and i was drawn to this sample curses program. I downloaded it – a paddle that moves up and down.
In about 2 hours, I had a snake program up and running. [...]

Modifying choice (command-line parser)

I liked choice so much, I didn’t want to leave it (I need unparsed args). So I went back to the source code. And then came back to my timeconverter. I realized I could clean up ARGV based on Choice.choices. This worked.

1 module Choice
2 def get_unparsed_args(args)
3 flat=Choice.choices.to_a.flatten
4 [...]

Command-line option parsing experiences with clip

I went through the one examples provided with clip . Looked very promising and simple. Until I applied it to my timeconverter program. Quick observations:
1. in the example “host” should be “server” (typo).
2. If using ruby -w, there are too many uninitialized variable warnings
3. Can’t reuse “-h”, yet on typing “-h” on prompt gives an [...]

Rewriting shell-scripts in ruby

Just a note to myself (before I start some real work), that I’ve gotta rewrite some of my most used shell scripts in ruby, and write future ones in ruby. Reasons for frustration with bash scripting:
- if and loop syntax gets me
- unpredictable behavior of unix commands due to differences between gnu, macport and bsd [...]

Ruby command-line parsing (update)

The issues with optiflag and choice: regarding determining unparsed arguments seems to have been posted in their respective forums a year or 2 back. But no response from authors. Are these 2 projects abandoned ?
I dipped into the source code of choice (parser.rb) to see if i could figure out how to extract the args, [...]

Command-line parsing: choice and optiflag

For some reason, I decided to go for choice, for a tiny time converter (DST) program I had put together. choice has a nice easy way of setting up the options configuration. Easy to remember, no syntax. It has the ability to filter and validate the args. Being a newbie, however I did waste an [...]

Command-line parsing: choosing a ruby library

I started with getoptlong, but lately decided to try something that would make life simpler. I need a parser that gives me options for:
mandatory flags
optional flags
switches
I used OptionParser for the ruby csplit program. The code of OptionParser is probably longer than the program [...]

Ruby time conversion with daylight saving

I had earlier posted that ruby was not taking DST into account when creating a date with EST as the timezone.
Finally got something working thanks to tzinfo. Needs to be installed separately.

1 #!/usr/bin/env ruby -w
2 # input may be given as "2:00 PM" or "14:00"
3 # http://tzinfo.rubyforge.org/doc/files/README.html
4 require ‘rubygems’
5 [...]

ruby one-liners as random signatures for blog posts and emails

The random sigs appearing below are due to some simple features of Vim (and bash).
1. Create sig files by splitting a tips/oneliners file. I found a ruby1liner file on the internet and split it based on ‘^#’. The file names are now ruby.1, ruby.2 etc. A tgz of these is here.
You can split the file [...]

Quick command-line syntax highlighting (coderay)

1 #!/usr/bin/env ruby
2 # courtesy: Helder
3 # http://obvio171.wordpress.com/2007/06/03/colorful-ruby-code-for-your-blog/
4 # modified to output to stdout so can be used as a filter
5 # 2008-09-03 23:22
6 require ‘rubygems’
7 require ‘coderay’
8
9 if ARGV.length != 1
10 puts "Wrong number of arguments. Use: codecolor.rb <source_file>"
11 [...]