Text Processing with Ruby by Rob Miller

Plain text is at the root of everything we can do as developers - we read it, we manipulate it, we write it back out as logs or files or HTML. We write it as code to do all that, and at the end of the day we use it to write blog posts like this. Rob Miller’s Text Processing with Ruby shows you how to do it as quickly, and elegantly, as possible.

A standout feature is the book’s use of command line tools. While there are obviously ways to count the number of lines in a file in Ruby, none are going to be as quick and as easy as cat file.txt | wc -l.¹ The book breaks down and blurs the edges between shell tools, Ruby scripts and larger, more organised code in a really beautiful way.

We’re shown tools like cat, grep and cut, and how to interoperate them with Ruby code written straight into the command line. And as this builds up we’re then shown how to handle standard input and output inside Ruby programs, allowing us to create our own command line tools that will play nicely as a part of a pipeline with the rest of the Unix tool chain.

For me this stuff is worth reading the book alone. Leveraging forty years worth of text tools along side your Ruby code gets more done and faster. The part of the book that demonstrates how to pipe out of a process into less to generate paging output was one of the most amazing things I’ve seen done in Ruby to date

Regular expressions are covered in greater depth than I have seen in other Ruby books, and with a strong emphasis on their real-world application. By the time I’d finished these sections I felt like a real regex ninja.

The book also shows how to use Ruby’s system variables (the ones starting with $) to keep regex and other code short. Some people (OK, my friend Andrea) dislike using anything starting with a $ in their code, and I can see their point as it can look a little esoteric and obscure. But it felt right to me in the context of this book; maybe you’d not want to use the system variables in larger, more modular software, but they’re perfect for the short, command line scripts often used to process text.

We’re also given a fun tour of parts of Ruby I’ve not seen - ERB templating (outside of a web framework), SimpleDelegator - and a few deep dives on popular text parsing and processing libraries such as the ever-present Nokogiri and StringScanner. Natural language processing and fuzzy matching using Phrasie and Text are shown off too.

I’ve found Text Processing with Ruby a great exploration of working with text both inside and outside of Ruby. Reading it has extended my knowledge of Ruby significantly, while giving me a wealth of new techniques and tools to use to manipulate text.

And that may be the biggest selling point of this book: 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.