// description of your code here

str = <<HTML_TEXT



  
Application error
  
Change this error message for exceptions thrown outside of an action (like 
in Dispatcher setups or broken Ruby code) in public/500.html


HTML_TEXT

puts str.gsub(/<\/?[^>]*>/, "")

Function

   # wdays is an array with the days of the week
   # to exclude days (eg: wdays = [0,6] for sunday and saturday )

   def calculate_working_days(d1,d2,wdays)
        diff = d2 - d1
        holidays = 0
        ret = (d2-d1).divmod(7)
        holidays =  ret[0].truncate * wdays.length
        d1 = d2 - ret[1]
        while(d1 <= d2)
                if wdays.include?(d1.wday)
                        holidays += 1
                end
                d1 += 1
        end
        diff - holidays
   end

Iterates over date range.

d1 = Date.new( 2006, 12, 1 ) 

d2 = Date.new( 2007, 1, 15 )

weekdays = (d1..d2).reject { |d| [0,6].include? d.wday } 

weekdays.length

The other day I was wondering why some really simple Ruby code of mine wasn’t working. The code under test looked something like this:

    def find_directories
        directories = []
        entries = `ls -l`.split/\n/  # get long-format directory listing
        entries.shift   # toss away the totals line
        entries.each do |entry|
            is_directory = (entry[0] == 'd')  # is it a directory?
            directories << dir if is_directory
        end
        directories
    end

I figured that my ls -l.split/\n/ trickery wasn’t working. So I fired up irb and tried it manually. It worked fine.
Then I sprinkled a few puts statements throughout. entries was fine, and each entry was perfect, looking something like this:

drwx------ 24 jcohen jcohen 816 Aug 19 11:04 Documents

I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. All I had to do was look at the first character of entry; if it was a ‘d’, then I knew I had a directory. But for some reason, is_directory was always false. I googled, checked the RDocs for the String class, thumbed through the PickAxe, and something I read triggered one of those ah-ha moments.
Rats: My C# brain is still alive and kicking.

To confirm my fears, I fired up irb again:

irb> s = "Jeff" 
=> "Jeff" 
irb> s[0]
=> 74

That’s right, folks: on a string, the bracket syntax – when given only one parameter – will return the ASCII value of the character inside. Not the actual character, as it will in C#.
To correctly grab a one-character substring from a string, you have to supply two parameters:

irb> s[0,1]
=> "J"