You'll learn how to get text into your Ruby programs from the file system and from user input. You'll process delimited files such as CSVs, and write utilities that interact with other programs in text-processing pipelines. Decipher character encoding mysteries, and avoid the pain of jumbled characters and malformed output.

Text is everywhere. Web pages, databases, the contents of files--for almost any programming task you perform, you need to process text. Cut even the most complex text-based tasks down to size and learn how to master regular expressions, scrape information from Web pages, develop reusable utilities to process text in pipelines, and more.

Text Processing with Ruby takes a practical approach to working with text. First, Acquire: Explore Ruby's core and standard library, and extract text into your Ruby programs. Process delimited files and web pages, and write utilities. Second, Transform: Use regular expressions, write a parser, and use Natural Language Processing techniques.