Day 247: Express Yourself

As mentioned yesterday, in the Bad Old Days (i.e. those before today) you had to name something and then give it a descriptive tag which was often just the thing name re-branded. Well those days are over!

The 'auto' button now takes the name and creates a tag for it. So:

Name: The Best Player in the World is from a City in an Arboretum

Becomes:

Tag: player_best_player_world_city_arboretum

So the tag is based on the type of object, plus a scaled down version of the name. As you no doubt noticed, I took out a bunch of connector words there (mainly articles). This involved regular expressions.

At first, I was doing something like this:

name.gsub!(/\sthe\s/,' ')
name.gsub!(/\sa\s/,' ')
name.gsub!(/\san\s/,' ')

Yes, I had one line for each thing I wanted to remove, which is of course silly. So I made a list of all the excluded words and tried again, only I ran into a problem. It's not a string I'm using for matching here, it's a regular expression - meaning I couldn't just throw the current loop value in the middle and expect it to work!

Luckily, there's a way to do exactly that:

exclusions.each do |x|
excludeMiddle = Regexp.new("\s#{x}\s")
name.gsub!(excludeMiddle,' ')
end


Regexp.new takes a string, from which it'll create a regular expression. And I can do all the manipulating I want within strings!

Also I made a few more planets using the new autotagging feature. But that's not as exciting.