Question

I have the following text which will always follow the same format:

 1
 "13"
 "241"
 "Rabun"
 "06"
 "County"

 2
 "13"
 "281"
 "Towns"
 "06"
 "County"

I would like to assign each section to a hash like:

locality= {:id => "", :fips1 => "", :fips2 => "", :county => "", :stateid => "", :type => ""}

How would I go about doing this in Ruby? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

fields = [:fips1,:fips2,:county,:stateid,:type]
arraywithhashes = yourtextdata.split("\n\n").map { |loc|
    Hash[
        [[:id,loc[/\d+/]]] +
        fields.zip(loc.scan(/"([^"]+)"/).map &:first)
    ]
}

If you add new fields to your file, the only you’ll need to edit is to add it to fields.