Ruby Filtering issue

Question

I have been trying to filter some text from a file to only show certain years of birth

I have some ruby that reads in a file ages.txt, it contains names and years of birth

I wish to be able to filter for a year range, i.e. to find people born between 1987 and 1990

I have tried

#open('ages.txt') { |f| f.grep(/^19(8[0-9]|10)$/) }

but I get an error

ages.rb:3:in `===': invalid byte sequence in UTF-8 (ArgumentError)

Any help would be greatfull.

Anthony Clark · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-25T16:49:07.123

1

The ^ and the $ make the expression try to match whole lines, which will not work.

Try: /19(8[7-9]|90)/

Here is a working version. Let me know if this helps.

edited Mar 25 '13 at 16:49

answered Mar 25 '13 at 16:43

Anthony Clark

Your answer should be here, not (only) on Rubular. – Tim Pietzcker Mar 25 '13 at 16:43
Added it in, sorry about that – Anthony Clark Mar 25 '13 at 16:50
It looks like that is an encoding problem. Have a look at [this question here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2982677/ruby-1-9-invalid-byte-sequence-in-utf-8/8873922#8873922). – Anthony Clark Mar 27 '13 at 02:57

1 Answers1