I have been recently wondering if Ruby is a better language for script kiddie
stuff. The kind of stuff I use awk, sed, grep, csh, and sh to accomplish. Some crazy people use perl to do this. But some folks suggest that Ruby is good for this. This is a very different application from Rails – it is super-perl.

I read on the Internet somewhere that Matz had a plan to make a better and more consistent perl when he started Ruby and you can see that in its design and what it has out of the box.

I recently decided to switch to the iPhone (previous post) and had to switch from MeetingMaker to iCal / iPhone / Google Calendar. But all my contacts were in Meeting Maker – what to do?

Meeting Maker has a text export of the contacts – the file is tab delimited and they do line-ends DOS-style. The Apple Address Book takes VCARD format.

Usually faced with this, I write some sed, awk, and shell script stuff – but this looked a little too nasty for that. Usually when I am writing multiline awk programs in separate files to get the job done, I realize that I have gone too far. Often I fall into something like Java at that point and kind of have to start over – but ultimately I get it done in Java feeling kind of bad about it.

So this was the perfect high-motivation situation for me to try Ruby on the command line.

Short story isthat I really liked it – it is simple but powerful – want to make an object? Do it. Want to split lines – do it? Want to ready the whole file into a string and break it into an array of strings based on CRTL-M – do it.

All in all I ended up with a pretty nice Meeting Maker to VCard conversion script. I will likely clean it up, add some doc, and then release it – I include my basic version below.

#!/usr/bin/ruby
# how many columns we expect
MAX = 25
FIRST = 0
LAST = 1
TITLE = 4
COMPANY = 6
EMAIL = 12
HOME = 13
WORK = 14
CELL = 15
NOTES = 25
# These are assumed to be contiguous and in the
# right order, see below
ADDR = 7
CITY = 8
STATE = 9
ZIP = 10
COUNTRY = 11
records = []
lines = []
#depending on line end - this will either get the
# whole file or the first line
firstline = gets
if firstline
secondline = gets
if secondline
# puts "Reading lines from input ..."
lines << firstline
lines << secondline
while gets
lines << $_
end
else
# split the lines basedon newline CTRL-M
lines = firstline.split("\015");
# puts "Split lines based on newline"
end
# puts "Lines read: " + lines.size.to_s
else
puts "No Input - nothing to process"
end
# Ignore the first three lines -
# the first is a blank line
# the second is "Contacts" and
# the third is the Column headings
3.upto(lines.size - 1 ) { |recpos|
# puts recpos.to_s + lines[recpos].to_s
record = lines[recpos].split("\011")
# puts record.size
# Set all nils to empty string to simplify code below
0.upto(MAX) { |j|
if record[j] == nil
record[j] = ""
end
record[j] = record[j].gsub('\n',' ')
record[j] = record[j].strip
# print j," ",record[j],"\n"; }
}
# Insist on at least a first or last name
fname = record[FIRST]
lname = record[LAST]
# no need to continue...
if  fname.empty? and lname.empty?
# puts "Skipping "+i.to_s
next
end
print "BEGIN:VCARD\n"
print "VERSION:3.0\n"
# "FN:AAA First AAA Last\n"
print "N:"
print lname unless lname.empty?
print ";"
print fname unless fname.empty?
print ";;;\n"
print "FN:"
print fname unless fname.empty?
print " " unless ( fname.empty? || lname.empty? )
print lname unless lname.empty?
print "\n";
unless record[COMPANY].empty?
print "ORG:"+record[COMPANY]+";\n"
end
unless record[TITLE].empty?
print "TITLE:"+record[TITLE]+";\n"
end
# print "EMAIL;type=INTERNET;type=WORK;type=pref:email@work.com\n"
unless record[EMAIL].empty?
print "EMAIL;type=INTERNET;type=WORK;type=pref:"+record[EMAIL]+"\n"
end
# print "TEL;type=WORK;type=pref:734-work\n"
unless record[WORK].empty?
print "TEL;type=WORK;type=pref:"+record[WORK]+"\n"
end
unless record[HOME].empty?
print "TEL;type=HOME;type=pref:"+record[HOME]+"\n"
end
unless record[CELL].empty?
print "TEL;type=CELL;type=pref:"+record[CELL]+"\n"
end
unless record[ADDR].empty? && record[CITY].empty?
&& record[STATE].empty? && record[ZIP].empty?
&& record[COUNTRY].empty?
print "item1.ADR;type=WORK;type=pref:;;"
# Assume they are contiguous
ADDR.upto(COUNTRY) { |pos|
field = record[pos]
print field unless field.empty?
print ";"
}
print "\n"
end
print "END:VCARD\n"
}