allowing strings without space between scalar & unit

[avitevet]

Hi,

I've recently discovered your ruby-units gem and would like to use it in my project (fitlogr.com). The functionality will be perfect for allowing user input in many types of distance or weight.

I will need it to allow numbers & units without space in between them, like "5k" or "95lbs." With the code currently in the github repo, when I run "1.1m".to_unit in irb, I get a systemstackerror, "stack level too deep." So I made a change that stops this from happening. I also cleaned up the test/ directory & added a test to the test_ruby-units.rb file, only because I'm familiar with that environment and not with the rspec environment.

I would like this change merged back into your repo because I think that this is the only change I'll make to the gem, and I would like to continue to get your updates without first merging them into my fork.

Thanks,

Avi

[olbrich]

The problem with this sort of change is that it introduces ambiguity into the parsing of units. For example, '11/m' could be interpreted as '1 1/m' or '11 1/m'.

However, there does seem to be some need/desire for this feature as this is the second pull request for essentially the same thing. I'll revisit this feature in the near future. Perhaps this can be a configuration option for now.

[avitevet]

You are right, I will also think more about this.

Does the ambiguity occur only for units with negative exponents? I've only worked with a very limited subset of your software for about 3 days so I don't understand all the various types of units it can handle. It seems to me that a string like "111/m" can only be validly interpreted as "11 1/m." It seems like "111 /m" is invalid as is "1 11/m" and "111/m (one hundred eleven over m)." Also, it seems to me that a string like "322/m" is not valid at all. Can you please comment on that?

Thanks,

Avi

[olbrich]

technically, something like "322/m" should be equivalent to "322 1/m". I think the only ambiguous case that might actually happen in practice would be something like "11/m". At this point, I'm inclined to interpret this as "1 1/m" instead of "11/m".