GFX Monk

Entirely too much investigation into ruby's match operator

Tim Cuthbertson — Sat, 02 May 2009 01:33:20 +1000

(how could a title like that not excite you! ;P)

So yesterday I had this weird regex issue in ruby. I wanted to get a regular expression containing a given string, but didn't want to have to manually escape all the special characters. Regexp.escape to the rescue! It escapes all regex metacharacters in any given string, and returns it as a regex. In fact, the docs assure me:

For any string, Regexp.escape(str)=~str will be true.

But not so much in practice?

>> str = "123"            
=> "123"
>> Regexp.escape(str)=~str
TypeError: type mismatch: String given

So, problem one: Regexp.escape is broken. It returns not a Regexp, but a string. Oddly enough it also seems to escape spaces and other innocuous characters, but at least you get the right result if you pump it through Regexp.compile(). However, that wasn't my only discovery.

I mentioned this to Matt, and he couldn't make much sense of it either. He noticed that the type error is specific to strings - if you use a number it just returns false:

>> 123 =~ 'foo'
=> false

Seems a bit odd, really. Fixnum doesn't implement =~, nor does Integer.

So I went doc spelunking. I found implementations for =~ in the following three important classes:

Regexp: regexp =~ str: do a regex match, as you might expect

String: str =~ obj: Call obj =~ str (i.e swap the order of your operands). Not mentioned in the docs but clearly apparent in the source (and experimentation): raise a TypeError if both arguments are strings. Without this, matching one string to another would very quickly run out of stack space.

Object: obj =~ other_obj: return false

So the Regexp implementation is fine. The String implementation is a little odd. I guess it's there to allow people to write matching statements either way, but it seems like a dangerous (and confusing) habit to condone.

But the Object implementation? Why??? What possible reason could one have for doing a match operation against two objects, neither of which implement any matching behaviour? This has the painful side effect of giving every single object I inspect a "=~" method which does nothing. No wonder Object.new() has over 120 methods on it ^*.

For comparison, python's object only has 12 methods / attributes. And they're all special names, so there's no pollution of regular names going on.

So there you go, two spoonfuls of broken in the one discovery!

(this is ruby 1.8.6, if that matters)

_{* I exaggerate, over 120 methods on object are just what you get in a rails app. Vanilla ruby only has 41 by my count. but it's still completely unnecessary, and adds noise to inflate that number}

ruby dataflow library

Tim Cuthbertson — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:28:33 +1000

ruby dataflow library

Pretty cool, I worry that such things can't easily be done so cleanly in python...

Germany Institutes Censorship Infrastructure

Tim Cuthbertson — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:43:14 +1000

Germany Institutes Censorship Infrastructure

At least our ISPs have a bit more guts, apparently in Germany five of the largest ISPs have already agreed to voluntarily submit to the process even without a law in place.

Or maybe Australian ISPs are just too lazy to implement internet filtering until they have to ;)

Windows 7 Starter Edition Only Runs 3 Applications At Once

Tim Cuthbertson — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 08:27:25 +1000

Windows 7 Starter Edition Only Runs 3 Applications At Once

A bunch of people respond that the only app they need is firefox. So why the crap are they still using windows? o_O

Along with some other brilliant suggestions: just run virtualbox with linux on it!. ugh...

Gruber calls it "Windows 7: We Hold You in Contempt and Dare You, Fucking Dare You, to Try Something Else Edition". Not far off, and yet I'm sure there will be many "happy" (is oblivious a better term?) customers.

Introduction to GNU Screen

Tim Cuthbertson — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:55:29 +1000

Introduction to GNU Screen

I've always felt it would be great to use this screen, but never had the cause nor the dedication. Now I'm kinda excited about it...