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I have a string that I'm using .split(' ') on to split up the string into an array of words. Can I use a similar method to split the string into an array of 2 words instead?

Returns an array where each element is one word:

words = string.split(' ')

I'm looking to return an array where each element is 2 words instead.

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How do you want to treat an odd number of words? Drop the last word? Drop the first word? Keep it? – Joe Frambach Apr 10 at 0:16
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Markthomas did you even read the question – Joe Frambach Apr 10 at 1:40

4 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted 
str = 'one two three four five six seven'
str.split.each_slice(2).map{|a|a.join ' '}
=> ["one two", "three four", "five six", "seven"]

This also handles the case of an odd number of words.

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I'm trying to figure out how I can reduce this to something like str.split.each_slice(2).map(&:join) but I can't get the ' ' argument on the join. – Joe Frambach Apr 10 at 0:12
up vote 1 down vote

Something like this should work:

string.scan(/\w+ \w+/)
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str = 'one1! two2@ three3# four4$ five5% six6^' outputs []. I don't know if the words are all alphabetic – Joe Frambach Apr 10 at 0:14
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maybe string.scan(/\S+ \S+/) would be better. – oldergod Apr 10 at 0:15
It's also unanswered how to tread an odd number of words. I dunno. – Joe Frambach Apr 10 at 0:16
Probably /\S+\s+\S+/ because you don't necessarily know that it's one space between words. – Joshua Cheek Apr 10 at 1:28
OP isn't responding, it could be that they literally want to split on spaces. Who knows... I'm not spending more time on this. – Joe Frambach Apr 10 at 1:42
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up vote 2 down vote

You can do

string= 'one1! two2@ three3# four4$ five5% six6^ sev'
string.scan(/\S+ ?\S*/)
# => ["one1! two2@", "three3# four4$", "five5% six6^", "sev"]
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Not if the last word is a single character. – Joe Frambach Apr 10 at 0:34
@JoeFrambach thank you, fixed. – oldergod Apr 10 at 0:36
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is you replace the ` ?` with \s*, then it will also preserve the original whitespace between the words. – Joshua Cheek Apr 10 at 1:38
@JoshuaCheek Sorry I don't get it. What do you mean by the original whitespace? – oldergod Apr 10 at 2:44
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@oldergod if it was "one1!\t two2@", this would retain the tab and extra spaces (SO is only displaying one space in the example, but pretend there were many) – Joshua Cheek Apr 10 at 2:51
up vote 0 down vote

Ruby's scan is useful for this:

'a b c'.scan(/\w+(?:\s+\w+)?/)
=> ["a b", "c"]

'a b c d e f g'.scan(/\w+(?:\s+\w+)?/)
=> ["a b", "c d", "e f", "g"]
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