Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

When writing code, it is good to be consistent about how you use whitespace. When collaborating with others, it can actually be detrimental to your group’s productivity if there is a mix of systems, so the sensible thing is to pick a standard early on and stick with it (even if that standard only defines the on-disk format, and individual programmers use editors which present the code to them in the way that works best for them). The policies that people choose may be partly a matter of taste, but there can still be logical reasons for preferring one system over another. Even though everyone weighs different pieces of evidence differently, I am going to state the whitespace system I use for my personal projects and list its good points. Maybe it will inspire someone into agreeing with me, or at least help them to be clearer about which system they prefer and why.

This month I found myself considering the problem of how to split a string representing some English text into substrings that contain only whole words, but where the substrings are as near as possible to a certain number of characters in length. Formalising this a bit, I wanted an algorithm which would take a string s of characters (including spaces but not as consecutive characters) and a number n, and return a substring of s starting at the first character (using one-based numbering) and going up to the mth character, where m ≤ n, character m+1 is a space, and any characters in s which are after the m+1th (exclusive) and before the n+1th (inclusive) are not spaces. That has probably made things sound more confusing, so imagine that n was 7, and s was “1234 6789 ABCD”, then m would be 4, and m+1 would be 5, meaning there are no spaces that are strictly after m+1 but before or including n+1. The main focus of this post, though, is showing the different ways it can be done in Groovy, and how beautiful those ways are, especially if you make it a one-liner.