Text Processing with Ruby: Extract Value from the Data That Surrounds You

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About Text Processing With Ruby: Extract Value From The

Product Description Text is everywhere. Web pages, databases, the contents of files--for almost any programming task you perform, you need to process text. Cut even the most complex text-based tasks down to size and learn how to master regular expressions, scrape information from Web pages, develop reusable utilities to process text in pipelines, and more.Most information in the world is in text format, and programmers often find themselves needing to make sense of the data hiding within. It might be to convert it from one format to another, or to find out information about the text as a whole, or to extract information fromit. But how do you do this efficiently, avoiding labor-intensive, manual work?Text Processing with Ruby takes a practical approach. You'll learn how to get text into your Ruby programs from the file system and from user input. You'll process delimited files such as CSVs, and write utilities that interact with other programs in text-processing pipelines. Decipher character encoding mysteries, and avoid the pain of jumbled characters and malformed output.You'll learn to use regular expressions to match, extract, and replace patterns in text. You'll write a parser and learn how to process Web pages to pull out information from even the messiest of HTML.Before long you'll be able to tackle even the most enormous and entangled text with ease, scything through gigabytes of data and effortlessly extracting the bits that matter.What You Need:This book requires a passing familiarity with the Ruby programming language, and assumes that you already have Ruby installed on your computer. Review "It is rare that a programming language can be unequivocally stated to be the right tool for a job. But when it comes to scanning, extracting, and transforming text, Ruby is that tool, and Rob Miller is the right guide to instruct you in the most effective and efficient application of it." Avdi Grimm Author, Confident Ruby; Head Chef, RubyTapas.com "This is a fun, readable, and very useful book. I'd recommend it to anyone who needs to deal with text -- which is probably everyone." Paul Battley Developer, maintainer of text gem "While Ruby has become established as a Web development language, thanks to Rails, it's an excellent language for working with text as well. Text Processing with Ruby covers the nuts and bolts of what I believe is a natural domain for Ruby, all the way from bringing text into the environment via files, the Web, and other means through to parsing what it says and sending it back out again." Peter Cooper Editor of Ruby Weekly Cooper Press "The biggest selling point of this book is that I can apply it right away -- I am literally using the things I've learned at work today. Perfect for the beginner to intermediate Rubyist, or any programmer who wants some standout techniques for handling text whatever language they're using." David Wickes Developer "A lot of people get into Ruby via Rails. This book is really well suited to anyone who knows Rails, but wants to know more Ruby." Drew Neil Director, Studio Nelstrom, and author of Practical Vim About the Author Rob Miller is Operations Director at a London-based marketing consultancy. He spends his days merrily chewing through huge quantities of text in Ruby, turning raw data into meaningful analysis. He blogs at robm.me.uk and tweets @robmil.