And often we need to do the folowing with a tweet

Well I had to do the following quite often:-

Take out the ‘@’ (i.e. @replies )and ‘#’ (i.e. hashtags ) from a tweet and separate it from the text part.

For example, we have a tweet:

@myfriend1 @myfriend2 this is a sample text #link #text

Now I want this tweet to be seperated into the following Array:

['myfriend1','myfriend2']

['link','text']

and the text only – ["this is a sample text "]

So first had to build a RegE, and then using the ever useful .gsub method of Ruby, created the following:

parsed_text = tweet.text.gsub(/ ?(@\w+)| ?(#\w+)/) { |a| ((a.include?(‘#’)) ? tags : replies) << a.strip.gsub(/#|@/,”); ” }

So the parsed_text has the final text only.  tags is an Array which will contain the hashtags and replies is an Array which will contain the @replies.

The RegEx / ?(@\w+)| ?(#\w+)/ extracts and seperates the hashtags & the @replies and place them in two seperate arrays.

The RegEx /#|@/,” only reples the ‘@’ and ‘#’ symbols in the extracted array elements.

And you can download it from Gist here http://gist.github.com/78498

Also while working on creating the above regular expressions, I found this interesting RegEx testing site called www.rubular.com which will help you write regular expressions very easily.

And do you know what, its has been made in RubyOnRails!

Do check out this site. It the brain child of Greg Narain who is a well know serial entrepreneur & social media expert.

Already people are talking about it and when its yet to be launched!!

Actually people like NYTime, CNET, Mashable have been talking about lil’grams for sometime. Even KillerStartups has a mention.

There is also a buzz on twitter too

Yes, some would say its been in making for quite sometime. But as they say patience has its virtue. Ultimately its a labour of love.

It been really a long journey for me personally too. Have been working on it for quite some time. I still  remember those days of sleepless night, long meeting, etc. 

Though I am yet to be a dad (a.k.a am un-married), I too  feel like a proud parent my self on the birth of lil’grams  which I feel is literally my baby! 

If you like (and also dont ) do tell us about it here which I assure will be promptly replied to

For Ruby On Rails, it is:

www.railsbrain.com

And for Ruby, we have:

www.rubybrain.com

And the best part is you can even download them so that you can use it offline!

Another good resource for Rails documentaion and help guides is the newly created collaborative effort Rails Guide project. This was started by @lifo as a project to give the rails community a good documentaion which was painfully lacking till now. Since its a collaborative effort, you can participate here. There is even buzz about this project on @twitter

{
telephone = “347-27456″
location = “New Delhi”
email = “xyz@gmail.com”
vcard = ERB.new( File.open(‘address.vcard.erb’ ){ |f| f.read } ).result( binding )
f = File.new(“temp_file.vcf”,”wb”)
f.puts vcard
f.close
}

and in pastie is here

You have got to remember that about model naming conventions in rails. . 

I know this is a very basic concept in RubyOnRails but sometimes these simple basic concepts are the ones which slip through the cracks.

Example:

> ruby script/generate model Post

This will create a Model by the name “Post” i.e. singular in english language and a migration to create a table by the name “Posts” which is plural form of “Post”.

I have even put this into a pastie for easier remembarance http://pastie.org/345491

I will try to be more regular here. In mean time, everyone who twitter and in New Delhi, India can check out the twitter.com/rubyonraildelhi where I have been posting regular rubyonrail updates and local information. You can find me on twitter here at @arjunghosh.

So here it goes:

To ensure that the page isn’t cached by the browser and will always be re-fetched, add a before_filter to the purchases controller which calls a private method on ApplicationController:

before_filter :no_cache, nly => [:new]
private
def no_cache
response.headers["Last-Modified"] = Time.now.httpdate
response.headers["Expires"] = 0
# HTTP 1.0
response.headers["Pragma"] = "no-cache"
# HTTP 1.1 'pre-check=0, post-check=0' (IE specific)
response.headers["Cache-Control"] = 'no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0, pre-check=0, post-check=0'
end

Now there is a catch – ‘not caching’ only works in Firefox.

Now the above code should have worked for all browser, but it did not work in Safari or in IE 6 and 7. The reason is that any page with an iframe on it will never be cached, and will always be re-fetched.

The solution is iframe. So, we add this to views/foo/new.

<iframe style="height:0px;width:0px;visibility:hidden" src="about:blank"> this frame prevents back forward cache </iframe>

This frame prevents back forward cache. And this works. Now we have cross-browser no-caching in a RESTful. Though this is a hack as Chad says. But it works for me.

So wanted a quick note on – How to make the text inside a textarea selectable on mouse click.

Well, we use the Javascript event system
[def: An event in Javascript is something that happens with or on the web page ].

Specifically we use the onclick Event to achieve the above stated goal. onClick applies to buttons (submit, reset, and button), checkboxes, radio buttons, and form upload buttons.

This is how we do it:

<textarea rows="3" cols="43" name="none" onclick="this.select();">This is the text which when clicked on will get selected</textarea>

The main syntactic sugar here is the “onclick=”this.select();”

Here the “this” helps us to access the textarea object and then we fire the DOM event “select()”
dynamically on it, which in turns selects the text inside the textarea.
ciao until next time