Question

Given a text block like

yada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yadayada yada

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Tekkub <[e-mail]> wrote:

With Rails3, I’d like to know, given a text block, how to find a string like:

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Tekkub <[e-mail]> wrote:

And then create a new variable with just the text above that matched string.

Thanks

…

Ideas:
1. First need to generate that string give the day, month:

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Tekkub <[e-mail]> wrote:

1. Use that string to then do a FIND? and some how apply a LEFT?

Answer 1

So, you could do this using the scan() method from ruby’s String class and a regex. This method is brittle, because it relies on the fact that On will always start the string you are looking for, and a : will always end it. But, if you say that “it should,” then this will work well. This code sample assumes that @emailreply is an instance variable containing the entire body of the email reply as a string, and will return an array of 1 containing the extracts. scan() returns an array of all the regex matches from the string.

 def extract_info
    extracts = @emailreply.scan(/On.*?:/)
    extracts
 end