Finding exact words in a string - ruby-on-rails

I have a list of links to clothing websites that I am categorising by gender using keywords. Depending on what website they are for, they all have different URL structures, for example...
www.website1.com/shop/womens/tops/tshirt
www.website2.com/products/womens-tshirt
I cannot use the .include? method because regardless of whether it is .include?("mens") or .include?("womens"), it will return true. How can I have a method that will only return true for "womens" (and vice versa). I suspect it may have to be some sort of regex, but I am relatively inexperienced with these, and the different URL structures make it all the more tricky. Any help is much appreciated, thanks!

The canonical regex way of doing this is to search on word boundaries:
pry(main)> "foo/womens/bar".match(/\bwomens\b/)
=> #<MatchData "womens">
pry(main)> "foo/womens/bar".match(/\bmens\b/)
=> nil
pry(main)> "foo/mens/bar".match(/\bmens\b/)
=> #<MatchData "mens">
pry(main)> "foo/mens/bar".match(/\bwomens\b/)
=> nil
That said, either splitting, or searching with the leading "/", may be adequate.

If you first check for women it should work:
# assumes str is not nil
def gender(str)
if str.include?("women")
"F"
elsif str.include?("men")
"M"
else
nil
end
end
If this is not what you are looking for, please explain your problem in more detail.

You could split with / and check for string equality on the component(s) you want -- no need for a regex there

keyword = "women"
url = "www.website1.com/shop/womens/tops/tshirt"
/\/#{keyword}/ =~ url
=> 21
keyword = "men"
url = "www.website1.com/shop/womens/tops/tshirt"
/\/#{keyword}/ =~ url
=> nil
keyword = "women"
url = www.website2.com/products/womens-tshirt
/\/#{keyword}/ =~ url
=> 25
keyword = "men"
url = www.website2.com/products/womens-tshirt
/\/#{keyword}/ =~ url
=> nil
Then just do a !! on it:
=> !!nil => false
=> !!25 => true

Related

Is there a method like "ILIKE" I can use in a Rails conditional statement?

I want to perform an action if a string is contained, non-case-sensitively, in another string.
So my if statement would look something like this:
#a = "search"
if #a ILIKE "fullSearch"
#do stuff
end
You can use the include? method. So in this case:
#var = 'Search'
if var.include? 'ear'
#action
end
Remember include? method is case-sensitive. So if you use something like include? 'sea' it would return false. You may want to do a downcase before calling include?()
#var = 'Search'
if var.downcase.include? 'sea'
#action
end
Hope that helped.
There are many ways to get there. Here are three:
'Foo'.downcase.include?('f') # => true
'Foo'.downcase['f'] # => "f"
Those are documented in the String documentation which you need to become very familiar with if you're going to program in Ruby.
'Foo'[/f/i] # => "F"
This is a mix of String's [] slice shortcut and regular expressions. I'd recommend one of the first two because they're faster, but for thoroughness I added it because people like hitting things with the regex hammer. Regexp contains documentation for /f/i.
You'll notice that they return different things. Ruby considers anything other than false or nil as true, AKA "truthiness", so all three are returning a true value, and, as a result you could use them in conditional tests.
You can use a regexp with i option. i for insensitive I think.
a = "fullSearch"
a =~ /search/i
=> 4
a =~ /search/
=> nil
Or you could downcase your string and check if it's present in the other
a = "fullSearch"
a.downcase.include?('search')
=> true

Check string is a valid number or not in ruby

I want to check weather variable contains a valid number or not.
I can validate correctly for null and blank but can not validate text as a "Integer"...
I tried:
if(params[:paramA].blank? || (params[:paramA].is_a?(Integer)) )
I have also tried is_numeric, is_numeric(string), is_number? and other ways...
but did not get success...
I saw such patch:
class String
def is_number?
true if Float(self) rescue false
end
end
if (params[:paramA].blank? || !params[:paramA].is_number?)
Or without the patch:
if (params[:paramA].blank? || (false if Float(params[:paramA]) rescue true))
It supports 12, -12, 12.12, 1e-3 and so on.
If your parameter is for an ActiveRecord model, then you should probably use validates_numericality_of. Otherwise...
You only want integers, right? How about:
if (params[:paramA].blank? || params[:paramA] !~ /^[+-]?\d+$/)
That is, check whether the parameter consists of an optional + or -, followed by 1 or more digits, and nothing else.
If the thing you want to do is this:
I want to check weather variable contains a valid number or not.
You can get it with regex. See it here
s = 'abc123'
if s =~ /[-.0-9]+/ # Calling String's =~ method.
puts "The String #{s} has a number in it."
else
puts "The String #{s} does not have a number in it."
end
In rails you can use the numeric? method on a String or Integer or Float which does exactly what you need.
123.numeric?
# => true
123.45.numeric?
# => true
"123".numeric?
# => true
"123.45".numeric?
# => true
"a1213".numeric?
# => false
UPDATE
My bad, I had a dirty environment, the above works if mongoid version 3 and above is loaded.

How do I add a LIKE condition to this Find array?

Thanks in advance for your help. I'm following the example I found here (Rails Find when some params will be blank) and trying to put together a bunch of conditions for a search form. This is for a Rails 2.3 legacy application. The below works for me, but I'm not sure how to do anything other than "=". For example, how can I make the programs_offered_category condition be a LIKE statement? I tried doing
majorcategories = params[:majorcategories]
Above the conditions statement and adding
conditions['programs_offered_category LIKE ?', "%#{majorcategories}%"]
but I get "wrong number of arguments (2 for 1)". Also, how can I do greater than and less than signs in this setup? Thanks!
search_controller.rb
conditions = {}
conditions[:city] = params[:city] unless params[:city].blank?
conditions[:state] = params[:state] unless params[:state].blank?
conditions[:geo_region] = params[:geo_region] unless params[:geo_region].blank?
conditions[:size_category] = params[:size_category] unless params[:size_category].blank?
conditions[:programs_offered_category] = params[:majorcategories]
#location_matches = Masterlocation.find(:all, :conditions => conditions, :order => 'nickname ASC').paginate(:page => params[:page], :per_page => 20)
I would suggest to use regular expression as follow
conditions['programs_offered_category'].map {|k,v| (k =~ /majorcategories/) ? v : nil}
It will return array of results if there is more than one matches otherwise single value

Extracting URLs from a String that do not contain 'http'

I have the following 3 strings...
a = "The URL is www.google.com"
b = "The URL is google.com"
c = "The URL is http://www.google.com"
Ruby's URI extract method only returns the URL in the third string, because it contains the http part.
URI.extract(a)
=> []
URI.extract(b)
=> []
URI.extract(c)
=> ["http://www.google.com"]
How can I create a method to detect and return the URL in all 3 instances?
Use regular expressions :
Here is a basic one that should work for most cases :
/(https?:\/\/)?\w*\.\w+(\.\w+)*(\/\w+)*(\.\w*)?/.match( a ).to_s
This will only fetch the first url in the string and return a string.
There's no perfect solution to this problem: it's fraught with edge cases. However, you might be able to get tolerably good results using something like the regular expressions used by Twitter to extract URLs from tweets (stripping off the extra leading spaces is left as an exercise!):
require './regex.rb'
def extract_url(s)
s[Twitter::Regex[:valid_url]]
end
a = "The URL is www.google.com"
b = "The URL is google.com"
c = "The URL is http://www.google.com"
extract_url(a)
# => " www.google.com"
extract_url(b)
# => " google.com"
extract_url(c)
# => " http://www.google.com"
You seem to be satisfied with Sucrenoir's answer. The essence of Sucrenoir's answer is to identity a URL by assuming that it includes at least one period. if that is the case, Sucrenoir's regex can be simplified (not equivalently, but for the most part) to this:
string[/\S+\.\S+/]
This is something I used a while ago, hopefully it helps
validates :url, :format =>
{ :with => URI::regexp(%w(http https)), :message => "Not Valid URL" }
Pass it through that validation (I assume your using a database)
Try with this method. Hope it will work for you
def get_url(str)
arr = str.split(' ')
url = nil
arr.map {|arr_str| url = arr_str if arr_str.include?('.com')}
url
end
This is your example
get_url("The URL is www.google.com") #=> www.google.com
get_url("The URL is google.com") #=> google.com
get_url("The URL is http://www.google.com") #=> http://www.google.com

Not assigning nil values to a hash

Is there a short hand or best practice for assigning things to a hash when they are nil in ruby? For example, my problem is that I am using another hash to build this and if something in it is nil, it assigns nil to that key, rather than just leaving it alone. I understand why this happens so my solution was:
hash1[:key] = hash2[:key] unless hash2[:key].nil?
Because I cannot have a value in the has where the key actually points to nil. (I would rather have an empty hash than one that has {:key => nil}, that can't happen)
My question would be is there a better way to do this? I don't want to do a delete_if at the end of the assignments.
a little bit shorter if you negate the "unless" statement
hash1[:key] = hash2[:key] if hash2[:key] # same as if ! hash2[:key].nil?
you could also do the comparison in a && statement as suggested in other answers by Michael or Marc-Andre
It's really up to you, what you feel is most readable for you. By design, there are always multiple ways in Ruby to solve a problem.
You could also modify the hash2 :
hash1 = hash2.reject{|k,v| v.nil?}
hash2.reject!{|k,v| v.nil?} # even shorter, if in-place editing of hash2
this would remove key/value pairs :key => nil from hash2 (in place, if you use reject! )
I like this the best, loop and conditional overriding all in one line!
h1 = {:foo => 'foo', :bar => 'bar'}
h2 = {:foo => 'oof', :bar => nil}
h1.merge!(h2) { |key, old_val, new_val| new_val.nil? ? old_val : new_val }
#=> {:foo => 'oof', :bar => 'bar'}
This will replace every value in h1 with the value of h2 where the keys are the same and the h2 value is not nil.
I'm not sure if that's really any better, but
hash2[:key] && hash[:key] = hash2[:key]
could work. Note that this would behave the same way for false and nil, if that's not what you want
!hash2[:key].nil? && hash[:key] = hash2[:key]
would be better. All of this assuming that :key would be an arbitrary value that you may not have control over.
How about something like this?
hash2.each_pair do |key, value|
next if value.nil?
hash1[key] = value
end
If you are doing just a single assignment, this could shave a few characters:
hash2[:key] && hash1[:key] = hash2[:key]
My first example could also be shaved a bit further:
hash2.each_pair{ |k,v| v && hash1[k] = v }
I think the first is the easiest to read/understand. Also, examples 2 and 3 will skip anything that evaluates false (nil or false). This final example is one line and won't skip false values:
hash2.each_pair{ |k,v| v.nil? || hash1[k] = v }
I believe the best practice is to copy the nil value over to the hash. If one passes an option :foo => nil, it can mean something and should override a default :foo of 42, for example. This also makes it easier to have options which should default to true, although one should use fetch in those cases:
opt = hash.fetch(:do_cool_treatment, true) # => will be true if key is not present
There are many ways to copy over values, including nil or false.
For a single key, you can use has_key? instead of the lookup:
hash1[:key] = hash2[:key] if hash2.has_key? :key
For all (or many) keys, use merge!:
hash1.merge!(hash2)
If you only want to do this for a couple of keys of hash2, you can slice it:
hash1.merge!(hash2.slice(:key, ...))
OK, so if the merge doesn't work because you want more control:
hash1[:key] = hash2.fetch(:key, hash1[:key])
This will set hash1's :key to be hash2, unless it doesn't exist. In that case, it will use the default value (2nd argument to fetch), which is hash1's key
Add this to your initializers hash.rb
class Hash
def set_safe(key,val)
if val && key
self[key] = val
end
end
end
use
hash = {}
hash.set_safe 'key', value_or_nil

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