Question

I have Facebook likes saved in a table (they’re in a string) and do the following in the console to return the likes using the like method for the user model:

User.first.likes

=> "--- !seq:Koala::Facebook::GraphCollection \n- name: Rome Sweet Rome\n  category:
   Book\n  id: \"136333439795671\"\n  created_time: 2011-09-05T12:03:09+0000\n- name:
   Drawn Together\n category: Tv show\n  id: \"8694990902\"\n  created_time:
   2008-10-03T10:39:46+0000\n"

Below it is in YAML:

y User.first.likes

--- |
 --- !seq:Koala::Facebook::GraphCollection 
 - name: Rome Sweet Rome
 category: Book
 id: "136333439795671"
 created_time: 2011-09-05T12:03:09+0000
 - name: Drawn Together
 category: Tv show
 id: "8694990902"
 created_time: 2008-10-03T10:39:46+0000

 => nil

I want the end result to give me something like:

>> ["Rome sweet Rome", "Drawn Together"]

Answer 1

Split the string into separate lines, delimited by the \n character (or if it comes across as the string “\n”, use double-quotes to delimit on that string)

like_elements = User.first.likes.split("\n") # <- String, not character, delimited version
=> ['id: "136333439795671"', 'created_time: 2011-09-05T12:03:09+0000", "- name: Drawn Together" ... etc.]

Then collect all elements that start with “- name: ” into their own array:

name_elements = like_elements.select{|s| s.start_with?("- name: ")}
=> ["- name: Drawn Together", "- name: Rome sweet Rome"]

Then take each of the elements in name_elements and strip out the leading "- name: " text, and remove leading an trailing whitespace

names_of_likes_only = name_elements.collect{|n| n.gsub("- name: ", "").strip}
=> ["Drawn Together", "Rome sweet Rome"]