flip_book is a small ruby application that reverses the order of words in a string without using the String#split method.
Create a new instance of FlipBook with a string:
content = "together. room the tied really rug That"
book = FlipBook.new(content)Use #flip to reverse the sentence:
book.flip
# ==> "That rug really tied the room together."This solution is best described backwards. The private method slice_first_word! takes a string as an argument making the assumption that it has at least one space. It uses the String#slice! method to return a substring up to and including the first whitespace. Its necessary to take the space with the substring even though it gets removed with rstrip because by using the bang(!) version of slice, the initial string is permanently changed and the split method depends on a whitespace not occuring until after at least one non-whitespace character.
The split method begins by assigning a duplicate of the string initialized in @content to the variable c; we don't know if we'll create other methods in the future that depend on @content keeping its original state. It news up an empty array words and then repeatedly pushes the return value of slice_first_word!(c) into it until c doesn't have any whitespace left in it. It then returns words with the remaining word from c pushed into it.
Now that the hard work is done, the public method flip simply reverses and joins the array of substrings returned by split.
By walking through the string chunk by chunk rather than iterating through the whole thing for every loop this solution should scale better; what if the string initialized at @content were actually the length of a book?!
Refactor of original solution aided by Brook Riggio.
README edited at dillinger.io.