The expression /^a-eg-h/.match('f') gives me nil in Ruby interpretor(2.3.1). I'm unable to figure out whats wrong.
Any suggestions ?
Ruby documentations states 'above expression should return #<MatchData "f">'.
As has been mentioned in the comments, your pattern is incorrect. It appears that you're attempting to use a character class, but have neglected to include the surrounding square brackets. Your pattern, as it currently stands, will only match on strings that start with the literal text a-eg-h. The pattern you want is:
/[^a-eg-h]/
Additionally, attempting to match the string j with this pattern will fail and return nil in Ruby, as the string does not match the pattern. A better way to go about this would be something like:
match = /[^a-eg-h]/.match(str)
if (match)
do_something()
end
Related
I have a string and I want to remove all non-word characters and whitespace from it. So I thought Regular expressions would be what I need for that.
My Regex looks like that (I defined it in the string class as a method):
/[\w&&\S]+/.match(self.downcase)
when I run this expression in Rubular with the test string "hello ..a.sdf asdf..," it highlioghts all the stuff I need ("hellloasdfasdf") but when I do the same in irb I only get "hello".
Has anyone any ideas about why that is?
Because you use match, with returns one matching element. If you use scan instead, all should work properly:
string = "hello ..a.sdf asdf..,"
string.downcase.scan(/[\w&&\S]+/)
# => ["hello", "a", "sdf", "asdf"]
\w means [a-zA-Z0-9_]
\S means any non-whitespace character [a-zA-Z_-0-9!##$%^&*\(\)\\{}?><....etc]
so using a \w and \S condition is ambiguous.
Its like saying What is an intersection of India and Asia. Obviously its going to be India. So I will suggest you to use \w+.
and you can use scan to get all matches as mentioned in the second answer :
string = "hello ..a.sdf asdf..,"
string.scan(/\w+/)
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.
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
The regular expression matching web application Rubular can be an incredibly helpful tool for doing realtime regular expression parsing.
I have the following string:
nothing to match
<-
this rocks should match as should this still and this rocks and still
->
should not match still or rocks
<- no matches here ->
And i want to find all matches of 'rocks' and 'still', but only when they are within <- ->
The purpose is to markup glossary words but be able to only mark them up in areas of text that are defined by the editor.
I currently have:
<-.*?(rocks|still).*?->
This unfortunately only matches the first 'rocks' and ignores all subsequent instances and all the 'still's
I have this in a Rubular
The usage of this will be somthing like
Regexp.new( '<-.*?(' + self.all.map{ |gt| gt.name }.join("|") + ').*?->', Regexp::IGNORECASE, Regexp::MULTILINE )
Thanks in advance for any help
There may be a way to do this with a single regex, but it will probably be simpler to just do it in two steps. First match all of the markups, and then search the markups for the glossary words:
text = <<END
nothing to match
<-
this rocks should match as should this still and this rocks and still
->
should not match still or rocks
<- no matches here ->
END
text.scan(/<-.*?->/m).each do |match|
print match.scan(/rocks|still/), "\n"
end
Also, you should probably note that regex is only a good solution here if there is never any nested markup (<-...<-...->...->) and no escaped <- or -> whether it is inside or outside of a markup.
Don't forget your Ruby string methods. Use them first before considering regular expressions
$ ruby -0777 -ne '$_.split("->").each{|x| x.split("<-").each{|y| puts "#{y}" if (y[/rocks.*still/]) } }' file
In Ruby, it depends on what you want to do with the regexp. You're matching a regular expression against a string, so you'll be using String methods. Certain of these will have an effect on all matches (e.g. gsub or rpartition); others will have an effect on only the first match (e.g. rindex, =~).
If you're working with any of the latter (that return only the first match), you'll want to make use of a loop that calls the method again, starting from a certain offset. For example:
# A method to print the indices of all matches
def print_match_indices(string, regex)
i = string.rindex(regex, 0)
while !i.nil? do
puts i
i = string.rindex(regex, i+1)
end
end
(Yes, you can use split first, but I expect that a regex loop like the foregoing would require fewer system resources.)
I am making a function that turns the first argument into a PHP var (useless, I know), and set it equal to the second argument. I'm trying to gsub! it to get rid of all the characters that can't be used in a PHP var. Here is what I have:
dvar = "$" + name.gsub!(/.?\/!#\#{}$%^&*()`~/, "") { |match| puts match }
I have the puts match there to make sure some of the characters were removed. name is a variable passed into a method in which this is its purpose. I am getting this error:
TypeError: can't convert nil into String
cVar at ./Web.rb:31
(root) at C:\Users\Andrew\Documents\NetBeansProjects\Web\lib\main.rb:13
Web.rb is the file this line is in, and main.rb is the file calling this method. How can I fix this?
EDIT: If I remove the ! in gsub!, it goes through, but the characters aren't removed.
Short answer
Use dvar = "$" + name.tr(".?\/!#\#{}$%^&*()``~", '')
Long answer
The problem you are facing is that the gsub! call is returning nil. You can't concatenate (+) a String with a nil.
That's happening because you have a malformed Regexp. You aren't escaping the special regex symbols, like $, * and ., just for a start. Also, the way it is now, gsub will only match if your string contains all that symbols in sequence. You should use the pipe (|) operator to make an OR like operation.
gsub! will also return nil if no substitutions happened.
See the documentation for gsub and gsub! here: http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/String.html#M001186
I think you should replace gsub! with gsub. Do you really need name to change?
Example:
name = "m$var.name$$"
dvar = "$" + name.gsub!(/\$|\.|\*/, "") # $ or . or *
# dvar now contains $mvarname and name is mvarname
Your line, corrected:
dvar = "$" + name.gsub(/\.|\?|\/|\!|\#|\\|\#|\{|\}|\$|\%|\^|\&|\*|\(|\)|\`|\~/, "")
# some things shouldn't (or aren't needed to) be escaped, I don't remember them all right now
As J-_-L appointed, you could also use a character class ([]), that makes it a little clearer, I guess. Well, it's hard to mentally parse anyway.
dvar = "$" + name.gsub(/[\.\?\/\!\#\\\#\{\}\$\%\^\&\*\(\)\`\~]/, "")
But because what you are doing is simple character replacement, the best method is tr (again reminded by J-_-L!):
dvar = "$" + name.tr(".?\/!#\#{}$%^&*()`~", '')
Way easier to read and make modifications.
You cannot apply a second parameter
and a block to gsub (the block is ignored)
The regex is wrong, you forgot the
square brackets:
/[.?\/!#\#{}$%^&*()~]/`
Because your regex is wrong, it
didn't match anything and because
gsub! returns nil if nothing was
replaced, you get this strange nil no
method error
btw: you should use gsub not gsub! in
this case, because you are using the
return value (and not name itself) --
and the error would not have happened
i dont see what the block is for
just do
name = 'hello.?\/!##$%^&*()`~hello'
dvar = "$" + name.gsub(/\.|\?|\\|\/|\!|\#|\#|\{|\}|\$|\%|\^|\&|\*|\(|\)|\`|\~/, "")
puts dvar # => "$hellohello"
or use [] to denote OR
dvar = "$" + name.gsub(/[\.\?\\\/\!\#\\\#\{\}\$\%\^\&\*\(\)\`\~]/, "")
you have to escape the special characters and then OR them so it will remove them individually not just if they are all found together
also there is really no need to use gsub! to modify the string in place use the non mutator gsub() since you assign it to a new variable,
gsub! returns nil for which the operator + is not defined for stings, which gives you the no method error mentioned
It seems as the 'name' object is nil, you may be calling gsub! on nil which usually complains with a NoMethodError: private method gusb! called for nilNilClass, since I don't know the version of ruby you are using I am not sure if the error would be the same, but it's a good place to start looking at.
Ruby 1.9.1, OSX 10.5.8
I'm trying to write a simple app that parses through of bunch of java based html template files to replace a period (.) with an underscore if it's contained within a specific tag. I use ruby all the time for these types of utility apps, and thought it would be no problem to whip up something using ruby's regex support. So, I create a Regexp.new... object, open a file, read it in line by line, then match each line against the pattern, if I get a match, I create a new string using replaceString = currentMatch.gsub(/./, '_'), then create another replacement as whole string by newReplaceRegex = Regexp.escape(currentMatch) and finally replace back into the current line with line.gsub(newReplaceRegex, replaceString) Code below, of course, but first...
The problem I'm having is that when accessing the indexes within the returned MatchData object, I'm getting the first result twice, and it's missing the second sub string it should otherwise be finding. More strange, is that when testing this same pattern and same test text using rubular.com, it works as expected. See results here
My pattern:
(<(?:WEBOBJECT|webobject) (?:NAME|name)=(?:[a-zA-Z0-9]+.)+(?:[a-zA-Z0-9]+)(?:>))
Text text:
<WEBOBJECT NAME=admin.normalMode.someOtherPatternWeDontWant.moreThatWeDontWant>moreNonMatchingText<WEBOBJECT NAME=admin.SecondLineMatch>AndEvenMoreNonMatchingText
Here's the relevant code:
tagRegex = Regexp.new('(<(?:WEBOBJECT|webobject) (?:NAME|name)=(?:[a-zA-Z0-9]+\.)+(?:[a-zA-Z0-9]+)(?:>))+')
testFile = File.open('RegexTestingCompFix.txt', "r+")
lineCount=0
testFile.each{|htmlLine|
lineCount += 1
puts ("Current line: #{htmlLine} at line num: #{lineCount}")
tagMatch = tagRegex.match(htmlLine)
if(tagMatch)
matchesArray = tagMatch.to_a
firstMatch = matchesArray[0]
secondMatch = matchesArray[1]
puts "First match: #{firstMatch} and second match #{secondMatch}"
tagMatch.captures.each {|lineMatchCapture|
puts "Current capture for tagMatches: #{lineMatchCapture} of total match count #{matchesArray.size}"
#create a new regex using the match results; make sure to use auto escape method
originalPatternString = Regexp.escape(lineMatchCapture)
replacementRegex = Regexp.new(originalPatternString)
#replace any periods with underscores in a copy of lineMatchCapture
periodToUnderscoreCorrection = lineMatchCapture.gsub(/\./, '_')
#replace original match with underscore replaced copy within line
htmlLine.gsub!(replacementRegex, periodToUnderscoreCorrection)
puts "The modified htmlLine is now: #{htmlLine}"
}
end
}
I would think that I should get the first tag in matchData[0] then the second tag in matchData1, or, what I'm really doing because I don't know how many matches I'll get within any given line is matchData.to_a.each. And in this case, matchData has two captures, but they're both the first tag match
which is: <WEBOBJECT NAME=admin.normalMode.someOtherPatternWeDontWant.moreThatWeDontWant>
So, what the heck am I doing wrong, why does rubular test give me the expected results?
You want to use the on String#scan instead of the Regexp#match:
tag_regex = /<(?:WEBOBJECT|webobject) (?:NAME|name)=(?:[a-zA-Z0-9]+\.)+(?:[a-zA-Z0-9]+)(?:>)/
lines = "<WEBOBJECT NAME=admin.normalMode.someOtherPatternWeDontWant.moreThatWeDontWant>moreNonMatchingText\
<WEBOBJECT NAME=admin.SecondLineMatch>AndEvenMoreNonMatchingText"
lines.scan(tag_regex)
# => ["<WEBOBJECT NAME=admin.normalMode.someOtherPatternWeDontWant.moreThatWeDontWant>", "<WEBOBJECT NAME=admin.SecondLineMatch>"]
A few recommendations for next ruby questions:
newlines and spaces are your friends, you don't loose points for using more lines on your code ;-)
use do-end on blocks instead of {}, improves readability a lot
declare variables in snake case (hello_world) instead of camel case (helloWorld)
Hope this helps
I ended up using the String.scan approach, the only tricky point there was figuring out that this returns an array of arrays, not a MatchData object, so there was some initial confusion on my part, mostly due to my ruby green-ness, but it's working as expected now. Also, I trimmed the regex per Trevoke's suggestion. But snake case? Never...;-) Anyway, here goes:
tagRegex = /(<(?:webobject) (?:name)=(?:\w+\.)+(?:\w+)(?:>))/i
testFile = File.open('RegexTestingCompFix.txt', "r+")
lineCount=0
testFile.each do |htmlLine|
lineCount += 1
puts ("Current line: #{htmlLine} at line num: #{lineCount}")
oldMatches = htmlLine.scan(tagRegex) #oldMatches thusly named due to not explicitly using Regexp or MatchData, as in "the old way..."
if(oldMatches.size > 0)
oldMatches.each_index do |index|
arrayMatch = oldMatches[index]
aMatch = arrayMatch[0]
#create a new regex using the match results; make sure to use auto escape method
replacementRegex = Regexp.new(Regexp.escape(aMatch))
#replace any periods with underscores in a copy of lineMatchCapture
periodToUnderscoreCorrection = aMatch.gsub(/\./, '_')
#replace original match with underscore replaced copy within line, matching against the new escaped literal regex
htmlLine.gsub!(replacementRegex, periodToUnderscoreCorrection)
puts "The modified htmlLine is now: #{htmlLine}"
end # I kind of still prefer the brackets...;-)
end
end
Now, why does MatchData work the way it does? It seems like it's behavior is a bug really, and certainly not very useful in general if you can't get it provide a simple means of accessing all the matches. Just my $.02
Small bits:
This regexp helps you get "normalMode" .. But not "secondLineMatch":
<webobject name=\w+\.((?:\w+)).+> (with option 'i', for "case insensitive")
This regexp helps you get "secondLineMatch" ... But not "normalMode":
<webobject name=\w+\.((?:\w+))> (with option 'i', for "case insensitive").
I'm not really good at regexpt but I'll keep toiling at it.. :)
And I don't know if this helps you at all, but here's a way to get both:
<webobject name=admin.(\w+) (with option 'i').