Remove quotation marks from an object - ruby

I want to call User.first, but I get it like "User.first". How can I strip the quotation marks so I can call User? Using a regex like this: gsub!(/\A"|"\Z/, "") returns nil instead of the expression.

First I would say that it's dangerous to do this based on where your input is coming from, but if you absolutely need to run arbitrary ruby code contained in a string, you would use eval:
http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.2.2/Kernel.html#method-i-eval
Again, I would avoid evaluating strings if at all possible.

Related

Replacing (escaping) characters in Groovy

For a gradle script, I am composing strings that will be used as command line for a subsequent gradle Test-task. One of the strings is the user's password, which eventually will be passed to the called (exec'ed) "java ..." call using the JVM's -D option, e.g. -Dpassword=foobar.
What complicates things here is, that this password can/should of course contain special characters, that may interfere with the use of the string as command line. In other words: I need to escape special characters (which is OS-specific). :-(
Now to my actual question:
I want to use the String.replaceAll method, i.e. replaceAll(list_of_special characters, EscapeCharacter + Ref_to_matched_character),
e.g. simplified something like replaceAll("[#$%^&]", "^$1")
'^' meaning the escape character and '$1' meaning the matched character here.
Is that possible, i.e. can one refer to the matched pattern in the second argument of replaceAll?
Is that possible, i.e. can one refer to the matched pattern in the second argument of replaceAll?
yes, it's possible
'a#b$c'.replaceAll('([#$%^&])', '^$1')
returns
a^#b^$c
Thanks for the responses and the reviews improving readability. Meanwhile I got my expression working. For those interested:
// handles gthe following: `~!##$%^&*()_+-={}|[]\:;"'<>?,./
escaped = original.replaceAll('[~!##\\$\\%\\^\\&\\*\\(\\)_\\+-={}\\|\\[\\]\\\\:;\"\\\'<>\\?,\\./]', '^$0') // for Windows - cmd.exe

Using a ruby regular expression

I'm completely new to Ruby so I was just wondering if someone could help me out.
I have the following String:
"<planKey><key>OR-J8U</key></planKey>"
What is the regex I have to write to get the center part OR-J8U?
Use the following:
str = "<planKey><key>OR-J8U</key></planKey>"
str[/(?<=\<key\>).*(?=\<\/key\>)/]
#=> "OR-J8U"
This captures anything in between opening and closing 'key' tags using lookahead and lookbehinds
If you want to get the string OR-J8U then you could simply use that string in the regular expression; the - character has to be escaped:
/OR\-J8U/
Though, I believe you want any string that is enclosed within <planKey><key> and </key></planKey>. In that case ice's answer is useful if you allow for an empty string:
/(?<=\<key\>).*(?=\<\/key\>)/
If you don't allow for an empty string, replace the * with +:
/(?<=\<key\>).*(?=\<\/key\>)/
If you prefer a more general approach (any string enclosed within any tags), then I believe the common opinion is not to use a regular expression. Instead consider using an HTML parser. On SO you can find some questions and answers in that regard.

How can I check for repeated strings with check-tail plugin in Sensu?

I am using sensu and the check-tail.rb plugin to alert if any errors appear in my app logs. The problem is that I want the check to be successful if it finds 3 or more error messages.
The solution that I came up with is using a regex like:
\^.*"status":503,.*$.*^.*"status":503,.*$.*^.*"status":503,.*$\im
But it seems to not work because of the match function: instead of passing the variable as a ruby regex it passes it as a string (this can be seen here).
You need to pass the pattern as a string literal, not as a Regexp object.
Thus, you need to remove the regex delimiters and change the modifiers to their inline option variants, that is, prepend the pattern with (?im).
(?im)\A.*"status":503,.*$.*^.*"status":503,.*$.*^.*"status":5‌​03,.*\z
Note that to match the start of string in Ruby, you need to use \A and to match the end of string, you need to use \z anchors.

How do I filter file names out of a SQLite dump?

I'm trying to filter out all file names from an SQLite text dump using Ruby. I'm not very handy/familiar with regex and need a way to read, and write to a file, another dump of image files that are within the SQLite dump. I can filter out everything except stuff like this:
VALUES(3,5,1,43,'/images/e/e5/Folder%2FOrders%2FFinding_Orders%2FView_orders3.JPG','1415',NULL);
and this:
src="/images/9/94/folder%2FGraph.JPG"
I can't figure out the easiest way to filter through this. I've tried using split and other functions, but instead of splitting the string into an array by the character specified, it just removed the character.
You should be able to use .gsub('%2', ' ') the %2 with a space, while quoted, it should be fine.
Split does remove the character that is being split, though. So you may not want to do that, or if you do, you may want to use the Array#join method with the argument of the character you split with to put it back in.
I want to 'extract' the file name from the statements above. Say I have src="/images/9/94/folder%2FGraph.JPG", I want folder%2FGraph.JPG to be extracted out.
If you want to extract what is inside the src parameter:
foo = 'src="/images/9/94/folder%2FGraph.JPG"'
foo[/^src="(.+)"/, 1]
=> "/images/9/94/folder%2FGraph.JPG"
That returns a string without the surrounding parenthesis.
Here's how to do the first one:
bar = "VALUES(3,5,1,43,'/images/e/e5/Folder%2FOrders%2FFinding_Orders%2FView_orders3.JPG','1415',NULL);"
bar.split(',')[4][1..-2]
=> "/images/e/e5/Folder%2FOrders%2FFinding_Orders%2FView_orders3.JPG"
Not everything in programming is a regex problem. Somethings, actually, in my opinion, most things, are not candidates for a pattern. For instance, the first example could be written:
foo.split('=')[1][1..-2]
and the second:
bar[/'(.+?)'/, 1]
The idea is to use whichever is most clean and clear and understandable.
If all you want is the filename, then use a method designed to return only the filename.
Use one of the above and pass its output to File.basename. Filename.basename returns only the filename and extension.

Another way instead of escaping regex patterns?

Usually when my regex patterns look like this:
http://www.microsoft.com/
Then i have to escape it like this:
string.match(/http:\/\/www\.microsoft\.com\//)
Is there another way instead of escaping it like that?
I want to be able to just use it like this http://www.microsoft.com, cause I don't want to escape all the special characters in all my patterns.
Regexp.new(Regexp.quote('http://www.microsoft.com/'))
Regexp.quote simply escapes any characters that have special regexp meaning; it takes and returns a string. Note that . is also special. After quoting, you can append to the regexp as needed before passing to the constructor. A simple example:
Regexp.new(Regexp.quote('http://www.microsoft.com/') + '(.*)')
This adds a capturing group for the rest of the path.
You can also use arbitrary delimiters in Ruby for regular expressions by using %r and defining a character before the regular expression, for example:
%r!http://www.microsoft.com/!
Regexp.quote or Regexp.escape can be used to automatically escape things for you:
https://ruby-doc.org/core/Regexp.html#method-c-escape
The result can be passed to Regexp.new to create a Regexp object, and then you can call the object's .match method and pass it the string to match against (the opposite order from string.match(/regex/)).
You can simply use single quotes for escaping.
string.match('http://www.microsoft.com/')
you can also use %q{} if you need single quotes in the text itself. If you need to have variables extrapolated inside the string, then use %Q{}. That's equivalent to double quotes ".
If the string contains regex expressions (eg: .*?()[]^$) that you want extrapolated, use // or %r{}
For convenience I just define
def regexcape(s)
Regexp.new(Regexp.escape(s))
end

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