Parsing text in Rails

Question

I have an RoR app running on Heroku, where I'm using the Cloudmailin add-on to send e-mails into the app itself.

The content of these e-mails will be used to create new content in the Database. It's an app, where the users can place Bets against other users. The results are the e-mailed into the app, so a settlement process can be triggered.

I have an Incoming Mails Controller that looks like this:

class IncomingMailsController < ApplicationController
  skip_before_filter :verify_authenticity_token

  def create
    Spotprice.create(:deliverydate => Date.tomorrow, :spotarea_id => Spotarea.find_by_areaname("Phelix").id, :product_id => Product.find_by_productname("Base").id, :value_in_currency => "87")
  end

end

The above works just fine, but I need it to read the content of the e-mail instead of the static content in the code above (Phelix, Base, Date.tomorrow and 87).

So how do I do that when the e-mail body looks like the below:

23112012 Phelix Base 87.00
23112012 System Peak 64.55

The mail has multiple lines, where each line is one new Spotprice in the Database. This means that I somehow also have to loop throught each line in tha mail and create each Spotprice seperatly.

Help will be very much appriciated :)

Answer 1

If all you're looking for is how to parse each line of space delimited text, this should work -

email_text_array = []

email_text.split("\n").each do |email_line|
    email_text_array << email_line.split(" ")
end

and email_text_array will look like

email_text_array = [
    ["23112012", "Phelix", "Base", "87.00"],
    ["23112012", "System", "Peak", "64.55"]
]