Magic First and Last Indicator in a Loop in Ruby/Rails?

Question

Ruby/Rails does lots of cool stuff when it comes to sugar for basic things, and I think there\'s a very common scenario that I was wondering if anyone has done a helper or s

Answer 1

Partition the array into ranges where elements within each range are supposed to behave different. Map each range thus created to a block.

class PartitionEnumerator
    include RangeMaker

    def initialize(array)
        @array = array
        @handlers = {}
    end

    def add(range, handler)
        @handlers[range] = handler
    end

    def iterate
        @handlers.each_pair do |range, handler|
          @array[range].each { |value| puts handler.call(value) }
        end
    end
end

Could create ranges by hand, but these helpers below make it easier:

module RangeMaker
  def create_range(s)
    last_index = @array.size - 1
    indexes = (0..last_index)
    return (indexes.first..indexes.first) if s == :first
    return (indexes.second..indexes.second_last) if s == :middle
    return (indexes.last..indexes.last) if s == :last
  end  
end

class Range
  def second
    self.first + 1
  end

  def second_last
    self.last - 1
  end
end

Usage:

a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

e = PartitionEnumerator.new(a)
e.add(e.create_range(:first), Proc.new { |x| x + 1 } )
e.add(e.create_range(:middle), Proc.new { |x| x * 10 } )
e.add(e.create_range(:last), Proc.new { |x| x } )

e.iterate