FriendlyRange

FriendlyRange makes it easy to parse and compose ranges of numbers in a human friendly way.

It allows you to easily accept multiple ranges as input, like 1-4, 9, 15-19. Just make sure ranges use hyphens and commas.

Installation

Add to your Gemfile:

gem 'friendlyrange'

Or install manually:

$ gem install friendlyrange

Usage

To parse a human-input range of numbers:

range = FriendlyRange.new('1-4, 9, 11-13')

Now just use the range as an array:

range.to_a
# => [1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 11, 12, 13]

Or, you can transform it back to a string:

range.to_s
# => "1-4, 9, 11-13"

Fun Stuff

You can even take ranges in weird orders:

range = FriendlyRange.new('5-9, 1, 3')

range.to_a
# => [1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

range.to_s
# => "1, 3, 5-9"

It will even reconcile "bad" input, with overlapping numbers. It will deduplicate any numbers automatically.

range = FriendlyRange.new('1, 1-4, 4')

range.to_a
# => [1, 2, 3, 4]

range.to_s
#=> "1-4"

It will also compensate for crap input. Human friendly!

range = FriendlyRange.new('1    - 4  , 8-  9     , 10')

range.to_a
# => [1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10]

range.to_s
# => "1-4, 8-10"

Feedback

I'd love any feedback. Just file an issue or pull request. Please make sure any pull requests have tests for whatever you've changed.