regular expression in ruby Regexp

Question

I'm using ruby 1.9.2

string = "asufasu isaubfusabiu safbsua fbisaufb sa {{hello}} uasdhfa s asuibfisubibas {{manish}} erieroi"

Now I have to find {{anyword}}

How many times it will come and the name with curly braces.

After reading Regexp

I am using

/{{[a-z]}}/.match(string)

but it return nil everytime.

Chris Salzberg · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-14 09:44:17Z

3

You need to apend a * to the [a-z] pattern to tell it to match any number of letters inside the {s, and then use scan to get all occurrences of the match in the string:

string.scan(/{{[a-z]*}}/)
=> ["{{hello}}", "{{manish}}"]

To get the number of times matches occur, just take the size of the resulting array:

string.scan(/{{[a-z]*}}/).size
=> 2

answered Dec 14, 2012 at 9:44

Chris Salzberg

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3 Comments

Sean Hill Over a year ago

Nice answer. I'd just like to add that if he needs to match upper and lowercase letters, he would need [a-zA-Z]. Cheers!

Chris Salzberg Over a year ago

@sean-hill Thanks! And I agree that [a-zA-Z] would probably be better, I just based my answer on the example which was all lowercase.

hd1 Over a year ago

Instead of '*', a '+' might be better, as the '*' would also match the string '{{}}'.

ezkl · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-14 09:44:41Z

2

The regular expression matching web application Rubular can be an incredibly helpful tool for doing realtime regular expression parsing.

answered Dec 14, 2012 at 9:44

ezkl

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