My code is about a robot who has 3 posible answers (it depends on what you put in the message)
So, inside this posible answers, one depends if the input it's a question, and to prove it, i think it has to identify the "?" symbol on the string.
May i have to use the "match" method or includes?
This code it's gonna be include in a loop, that may answer in 3 possible ways.
Example:
puts "whats your meal today?"
answer = gets.chomp
answer.includes? "?"
or
answer.match('?')
Take a look at String#end_with? I think that is what you should use.
Use String#match? Instead
String#chomp will only remove OS-specific newlines from a String, but neither String#chomp nor String#end_with? will handle certain edge cases like multi-line matches or strings where you have whitespace characters at the end. Instead, use a regular expression with String#match?. For example:
print "Enter a meal: "
answer = gets.chomp
answer.match? /\?\s*\z/m
The Regexp literal /\?\s*\z/m will return true value if the (possibly multi-line) String in your answer contains:
a literal question mark (which is why it's escaped)...
followed by zero or more whitespace characters...
anchored to the end-of-string with or without newline characters, e.g. \n or \r\n, although those will generally have been removed by #chomp already.
This will be more robust than your current solution, and will handle a wider variety of inputs while being more accurate at finding strings that end with a question mark without regard to trailing whitespace or line endings.
Related
I'm trying to get my head around how to work with Classes in Ruby and would really appreciate some insight on this area. Currently, I've got a rather simple task to convert a string with the start of each word capitalized. For example:
Not Jaden-Cased: "How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real"
Jaden-Cased: "How Can Mirrors Be Real If Our Eyes Aren't Real"
This is my code currently:
class String
def toJadenCase
split
capitalize
end
end
#=> usual case: split.map(&:capitalize).join(' ')
Output:
Expected: "The Moment That Truth Is Organized It Becomes A Lie.",
instead got: "The moment that truth is organized it becomes a lie."
I suggest you not pollute the core String class with the addition of an instance method. Instead, just add an argument to the method to hold the string. You can do that as follows, by downcasing the string then using gsub with a regular expression.
def to_jaden_case(str)
str.downcase.gsub(/(?<=\A| )[a-z]/) { |c| c.upcase }
end
to_jaden_case "The moMent That trUth is organized, it becomes a lie."
#=> "The Moment That Truth Is Organized, It Becomes A Lie."
Ruby's regex engine performs the following operations.
(?<=\A| ) : use a positive lookbehind to assert that the following match
is immediately preceded by the start of the string or a space
[a-z] : match a lowercase letter
(?<=\A| ) can be replaced with the negative lookbehind (?<![^ ]), which asserts that the match is not preceded by a character other than a space.
Notice that by using String#gsub with a regular expression (unlike the split-process-join dance), extra spaces are preserved.
When spaces are to be matched by a regular expression one often sees whitespaces (\s) matched instead. Here, for example, /(?<=\A|\s)[a-z]/ works fine, but sometimes matching whitespaces leads to problems, mainly because they also match newlines (\n) (as well as spaces, tabs and a few other characters). My advice is to match space characters if spaces are to be matched. If tabs are to be matched as well, use a character class ([ \t]).
Try:
def toJadenCase
self.split.map(&:capitalize).join(' ')
end
Consider this example string:
mystr ="1. moody"
I want to capitalize the first letter that occurs in mystr. I am trying this regular expression in Ruby but still returns all the letters in mystr (moody) instead of the letter m only.
puts mystr.scan(/[a-zA-Z]{1}/)
Any help appreciated!
Do as below using String#sub
(arup~>~)$ pry --simple-prompt
>> s = "1. moody"
=> "1. moody"
>> s.sub(/[a-z]/i,&:upcase)
=> "1. Moody"
>>
If you want to modify the source string use s.sub!(/[a-z]/,&:upcase).
Just for completeness, although it doesn’t directly answer your question as posed but could be relevant, consider this variation:
mystr ="1. école"
The line mystr.sub(/[a-z]/i,&:upcase) (as in Arup Rakshit’s answer) will match the second letter of the word, producing
1. éCole
The line mystr.sub /\b\s?[a-zA-Z]{1}/, &:upcase (diego.greyrobot’s answer) won’t match at all and so the line will be unchanged.
There are two problems here. The first is that [a-zA-Z] doesn’t match accented characters, so é isn’t matched. The fix for this is to use the \p{Letter} character property:
mystr.sub /\p{Letter}/, &:upcase
This will match the character in question, but won’t change it. This is due to the second problem, which is that upcase (and downcase) only works on characters in the ASCII range. This is almost as easy to fix, but relies on using an external library such as unicode_utils:
require 'unicode_utils'
mystr.sub(/\p{Letter}/) { |c| UnicodeUtils.upcase(c)}
This results in:
1. École
which is probably what is wanted in this case.
This may not affect you if you are sure all your data is just ASCII, but is worth knowing for other situations.
The reason your attempt returns all the letters is because you are using the scan method which does just that, it returns all the characters which match the regex, in your case letters. For your use case you should use sub since you only want to substitute 1 letter.
I use http://rubular.com to practice my Ruby Regexes. Here's what I came up with http://rubular.com/r/fAQEDFVEVn
The regex is: /\b[a-z]/
It uses \b to find a word boundary, and finally we ask for one letter only with [a-zA-Z]
Finally we'll use sub to replace it with its upcased version:
"1. moody".sub /\b[a-z]/, &:upcase
=> "1. Moody"
Hope that helps.
I'm trying to make a simple Ruby regex to detect a JavaScript Declaration, but it fails.
Regex:
lines.each do |line|
unminifiedvar = /var [0-9a-zA-Z] = [0-9];/.match(line)
next if unminifiedvar == nil #no variable declarations on the line
#...
end
Testing Line:
var testvariable10 = 9;
A variable name can have more than one character, so you need a + after the character-set [...]. (Also, JS variable names can contain other characters besides alphanumerics.) A numeric literal can have more than one character, so you want a + on the RHS too.
More importantly, though, there are lots of other bits of flexibility that you'll find more painful to process with a regular expression. For instance, consider var x = 1+2+3; or var myString = "foo bar baz";. A variable declaration may span several lines. It need not end with a semicolon. It may have comments in the middle of it. And so on. Regular expressions are not really the right tool for this job.
Of course, it may happen that you're parsing code from a particular source with a very special structure and can guarantee that every declaration has the particular form you're looking for. In that case, go ahead, but if there's any danger that the nature of the code you're processing might change then you're going to be facing a painful problem that really isn't designed to be solved with regular expressions.
[EDITED about a day after writing, to fix a mistake kindly pointed out by "the Tin Man".]
You forgot the +, as in, more than one character for the variable name.
var [0-9a-zA-Z]+ = [0-9];
You may also want to add a + after the [0-9]. That way it can match multiple digits.
var [0-9a-zA-Z]+ = [0-9]+;
http://rubular.com/r/kPlNcGRaHA
Try /var [0-9a-zA-Z]+ = \d+;/
Without the +, [0-9a-zA-Z] will only match a single alphanumeric character. With +, it can match 1 or more alphanumeric characters.
By the way, to make it more robust, you may want to make it match any number of spaces between the tokens, not just exactly one space each. You may also want to make the semicolon at the end optional (because Javascript syntax doesn't require a semicolon). You might also want to make it always match against the whole line, not just a part of the line. That would be:
/\Avar\s+[0-9a-zA-Z]+\s*=\s*\d+;?\Z/
(There is a way to write [0-9a-zA-Z] more concisely, but it has slipped my memory; if someone else knows, feel free to edit this answer.)
I have the following
address.gsub(/^\d*/, "").gsub(/\d*-?\d*$/, "").gsub(/\# ?\d*/,"")
Can this be done in one gsub? I would like to pass a list of patterns rather then just one pattern - they are all being replaced by the same thing.
You could combine them with an alternation operator (|):
address = '6 66-666 #99 11-23'
address.gsub(/^\d*|\d*-?\d*$|\# ?\d*/, "")
# " 66-666 "
address = 'pancakes 6 66-666 # pancakes #99 11-23'
address.gsub(/^\d*|\d*-?\d*$|\# ?\d*/,"")
# "pancakes 6 66-666 pancakes "
You might want to add little more whitespace cleanup. And you might want to switch to one of:
/\A\d*|\d*-?\d*\z|\# ?\d*/
/\A\d*|\d*-?\d*\Z|\# ?\d*/
depending on what your data really looks like and how you need to handle newlines.
Combining the regexes is a good idea--and relatively simple--but I'd like to recommend some additional changes. To wit:
address.gsub(/^\d+|\d+(?:-\d+)?$|\# *\d+/, "")
Of your original regexes, ^\d* and \d*-?\d*$ will always match, because they don't have to consume any characters. So you're guaranteed to perform two replacements on every line, even if that's just replacing empty strings with empty strings. Of my regexes, ^\d+ doesn't bother to match unless there's at least one digit at the beginning of the line, and \d+(?:-\d+)?$ matches what looks like an integer-or-range expression at the end of the line.
Your third regex, \# ?\d*, will match any # character, and if the # is followed by a space and some digits, it'll take those as well. Judging by your other regexes and my experience with other questions, I suspect you meant to match a # only if it's followed by one or more digits, with optional spaces intervening. That's what my third regex does.
If any of my guesses are wrong, please describe what you were trying to do, and I'll do my best to come up with the right regex. But I really don't think those first two regexes, at least, are what you want.
EDIT (in answer to the comment): When working with regexes, you should always be aware of the distinction between a regex the matches nothing and a regex that doesn't match. You say you're applying the regexes to street addresses. If an address doesn't happen to start with a house number, ^\d* will match nothing--that is, it will report a successful match, said match consisting of the empty string preceding the first character in the address.
That doesn't matter to you, you're just replacing it with another empty string anyway. But why bother doing the replacement at all? If you change the regex to ^\d+, it will report a failed match and no replacement will be performed. The result is the same either way, but the "matches noting" scenario (^\d*) results in a lot of extra work that the "doesn't match" scenario avoids. In a high-throughput situation, that could be a life-saver.
The other two regexes bring additional complications: \d*-?\d*$ could match a hyphen at the end of the string (e.g. "123-", or even "-"); and \# ?\d* could match a hash symbol anywhere in string, not just as part of an apartment/office number. You know your data, so you probably know neither of those problems will ever arise; I'm just making sure you're aware of them. My regex \d+(?:-\d+)?$ deals with the trailing-hyphen issue, and \# *\d+ at least makes sure there are digits after the hash symbol.
I think that if you combine them together in a single gsub() regex, as an alternation,
it changes the context of the starting search position.
Example, each of these lines start at the beginning of the result of the previous
regex substitution.
s/^\d*//g
s/\d*-?\d*$//g
s/\# ?\d*//g
and this
s/^\d*|\d*-?\d*$|\# ?\d*//g
resumes search/replace where the last match left off and could potentially produce a different overall output, especially since a lot of the subexpressions search for similar
if not the same characters, distinguished only by line anchors.
I think your regex's are unique enough in this case, and of course changing the order
changes the result.
I'm not sure how to use regular expressions in a function so that I could grab all the words in a sentence starting with a particular letter. I know that I can do:
word =~ /^#{letter}/
to check if the word starts with the letter, but how do I go from word to word. Do I need to convert the string to an array and then iterate through each word or is there a faster way using regex? I'm using ruby so that would look like:
matching_words = Array.new
sentance.split(" ").each do |word|
matching_words.push(word) if word =~ /^#{letter}/
end
Scan may be a good tool for this:
#!/usr/bin/ruby1.8
s = "I think Paris in the spring is a beautiful place"
p s.scan(/\b[it][[:alpha:]]*/i)
# => ["I", "think", "in", "the", "is"]
\b means 'word boundary."
[:alpha:] means upper or lowercase alpha (a-z).
You can use \b. It matches word boundaries--the invisible spot just before and after a word. (You can't see them, but oh they're there!) Here's the regex:
/\b(a\w*)\b/
The \w matches a word character, like letters and digits and stuff like that.
You can see me testing it here: http://rubular.com/regexes/13347
Similar to Anon.'s answer:
/\b(a\w*)/g
and then see all the results with (usually) $n, where n is the n-th hit. Many libraries will return /g results as arrays on the $n-th set of parenthesis, so in this case $1 would return an array of all the matching words. You'll want to double-check with whatever library you're using to figure out how it returns matches like this, there's a lot of variation on global search returns, sadly.
As to the \w vs [a-zA-Z], you can sometimes get faster execution by using the built-in definitions of things like that, as it can easily have an optimized path for the preset character classes.
The /g at the end makes it a "global" search, so it'll find more than one. It's still restricted by line in some languages / libraries, though, so if you wish to check an entire file you'll sometimes need /gm, to make it multi-line
If you want to remove results, like your title (but not question) suggests, try:
/\ba\w*//g
which does a search-and-replace in most languages (/<search>/<replacement>/). Sometimes you need a "s" at the front. Depends on the language / library. In Ruby's case, use:
string.gsub(/(\b)a\w*(\b)/, "\\1\\2")
to retain the non-word characters, and optionally put any replacement text between \1 and \2. gsub for global, sub for the first result.
/\ba[a-z]*\b/i
will match any word starting with 'a'.
The \b indicates a word boundary - we want to only match starting from the beginning of a word, after all.
Then there's the character we want our word to start with.
Then we have as many as possible letter characters, followed by another word boundary.
To match all words starting with t, use:
\bt\w+
That will match test but not footest; \b means "word boundary".
Personally i think that regex is overkill for this application, simply running a select is more than capable of solving this particular problem.
"this is a test".split(' ').select{ |word| word[0,1] == 't' }
result => ["this", "test"]
or if you are determined to use regex then go with grep
"this is a test".split(' ').grep(/^t/)
result => ["this", "test"]
Hope this helps.