I am trying to write a method to pulls out every string that matches the criteria from a large text file:
Every element is separated by a comma
The first 5 elements could be any number from 1-59
The next 21 elements should be numbers from 1-5
The next 27 elements could be either true or false (no caps)
The final 5 elements are integers from 1-5
My code:
#this string should be returned by the regex matching
str="3,15,14,31,40,5,5,4,5,3,4,4,5,2,2,2,1,2,1,1,3,3,3,2,4,3,false,false,false,false,false,true,false,true,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,true,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,3,3,3,2,3"
matchResult=/[1-59]{5}[1-5]{21}[true|false]{27}[1-5]{5}/.match(str)
matchResult.each{|x| #this doesnt work....why?
puts x
}
What is the correct way to print all matches? matchResult.each throws an error. I thought it returned an array of matches.
How can I adjust my regex to expect a comma between every value (not at the ends of the string)?
Put true or false inside a capturing group or non-capturing group like (?:true|false) so that it would match the exact true or false substring , this [true|false] will match a single character only whether it may be t or r or u or e or | ,....
> str="3,15,14,31,40,5,5,4,5,3,4,4,5,2,2,2,1,2,1,1,3,3,3,2,4,3,false,false,false,false,false,true,false,true,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,true,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,3,3,3,2,3"
> str.match(/^(?:[1-5]\d|[1-9])(?:,(?:[1-5]\d|[1-9])){4}(?:,[1-5]){21}(?:,(?:true|false)){27}(?:,[1-5]){5}$/)
=> #<MatchData "3,15,14,31,40,5,5,4,5,3,4,4,5,2,2,2,1,2,1,1,3,3,3,2,4,3,false,false,false,false,false,true,false,true,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,true,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,false,3,3,3,2,3">
In regards to your first question:
"What is the correct way to print all matches? matchResult.each throws an error. I thought it returned an array of matches."
The Regex .match method doesn't return an array of matches; it returns either a match object (in this case, a string, since you're calling .match on a string) or nil if there are no matches (see docs here).
This means matchResult is a string, and you can't call .each on a string, which is why you're getting an error message. See this post for more info on .each & strings.
Related
I have a string https://stackverflow.com. I want a new string that contains the domain from the given string using regular expressions.
Example:
x = "https://stackverflow.com"
newstring = "stackoverflow.com"
Example 2:
x = "https://www.stackverflow.com"
newstring = "www.stackoverflow.com"
"https://stackverflow.com"[/(?<=:\/\/).*/]
#⇒ "stackverflow.com"
(?<=..) is a positive lookbehind.
If string = "http://stackoverflow.com",
a really easy way is string.split("http://")[1]. But this isn't regex.
A regex solution would be as follows:
string.scan(/^http:\/\/(.+)$/).flatten.first
To explain:
String#scan returns the first match of the regex.
The regex:
^ matches beginning of line
http: matches those characters
\/\/ matches //
(.+) sets a "match group" containing any number of any characters. This is the value returned by the scan.
$ matches end of line
.flatten.first extracts the results from String#scan, which in this case returns a nested array.
You might want to try this:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
str = "https://stackoverflow.com"
if mtch = str.match(/(?::\/\/)(/S)/)
f1 = mtch.captures
end
There are two capturing groups in the match method: the first one is a non-capturing group referring to your search pattern and the second one referring to everything else afterwards. After that, the captures method will assign the desired result to f1.
I hope this solves your problem.
I'm facing a very strange behaviour with ruby String#scan method return. I have this code below and I can't find out why "scan" doesn't return 2 elements.
str = "10011011001"
regexp = "0110"
p str.scan(/(#{regexp})/)
==> [["0110"]]
String "str" clearly contains 2 occurrences of pattern "0110".
I want to fetch all the occurences of my regexp in str of course.
The reason is that after finding the first result, the regex engine continues its walk at the position after this first result. So the zero at the end of the first result can't be reuse for an other result.
The way to get overlapping results is to put your pattern in a lookahead and in a capture group (a lookahead is only a zero-width assertion (a test) and doesn't consume any characters). In this way the regex engine advance always one character at a time and can test all positions in the string even something is captured in the group:
(?=(yourpattern))
Then your result is in the capture group 1
With your example:
p str.scan(/(?=(0110))/)
[["0110"], ["0110"]]
str = "10011011001"
match = "0110"
str.chars.each_cons(match.size).map(&:join).select { |cons| cons == match }
Should do it.
string = 'xabcdexfghijk'
In the example above, 'x' appears twice. I want to capture everything between the first 'x' and the next 'x'. Thus, the desired result is a new string that equals 'xabcdex'. Any ideas?
You could use a simple regular expression: /x.*?x/. This basically means "match any characters in between two x characters, as few times as possible (non-greedy)".
The matched text can be extracted with String#[regexp]
string = 'xabcdexfghijk'
string[/x.*?x/] # => "xabcdex"
I need a very simple string validator that would show where is first symbol not corresponding to the desired format. I want to use regex but in this case I have to find the place where the string stops corresponding to the expression and I can't find a method that would do that.
(It's got to be a fairly simple method... maybe there isn't one?)
For example if I have regex:
/^Q+E+R+$/
with string:
"QQQQEEE2ER"
The desired result should be 7
An idea: what you can do is to tokenize your pattern and write it with optional nested capturing groups:
^(Q+(E+(R+($)?)?)?)?
Then you only need to count the number of capture groups you obtain to know where the regex engine stops in the pattern and you can determine the offset of the match end in the string with the whole match length.
As #zx81 notices it in his comment, if one of the elements can match the next element (example Q can match the element E), things become different.
Let's say that Q is \w (and can match E and R). For the string QQQEEERRR the precedent pattern will give only one capturing group (the greedy \w+ matches all) when ^(\w+)(E+)(R+)$ will give three groups: QQQEE, E, RRR
To obtain the same result you need to add an alternation:
^((?:\w+(?=E)|\w+)(E+(R+($)?)?)?)?
In the alternation, the case where E exists must be tested first, and only if this branch fails (with the lookahead), then the other branch where E doesn't exist is used.
Thus the full pattern can be rewritten like this to deal with this specific case:
^((?:Q+(?=E)|Q+)((?:E+(?=R)|E+)((?:R+(?=$)|R+)($)?)?)?)?
Perhaps could you take a look to the gem amatch too.
This is an interesting task that can be accomplished with a neat regex trick:
^(?:(?=(Q+)))?(?:(?=(Q+E+)))?(?:(?=(Q+E+R+)))?(?:(?=(Q+E+R+$)))?
We have four optional lookaheads checking various parts of the pattern and capturing the partial matches to Groups 1, 2, 3 and 4 incrementally.
Group 1 contains Q+ if it can be matched, in your example QQQQ.
Group 2 contains Q+E+ if it can be matched, in your example EEE.
Group 3 contains Q+E+R+ if it can be matched, in your example nil.
Group 3 contains Q+E+R+$ if it can be matched, in your example nil.
In your code, check which is the last Group that is set by testing !$1.nil?, !$2.nil? and so on.
The last one set gives you the length that is matchable, so in your example $2.length gives you the 7 you wanted.
Incidentally, the fact that Group 2 is the last one set also tells you that we fail on R+.
For your example, you could do the following.
Code
Change your regex from:
/^Q+E+R+$/
to
R = /^(Q*)(E*)(R*)/
and then apply the following method to the string:
def nbr_matched_chars(str)
str.scan(R).flatten.reduce(0) {|t,e| return t if e.nil?; t+e.size }
end
str matches the original regex if and only if nbr_matched_chars(str) == str.size.
Examples
nbr_matched_chars("QQQQEEE2ER") #=> 7
nbr_matched_chars("QQQQEEEERR") #=> 10 (= "QQQQEEEERR".size)
nbr_matched_chars("QQAQQEEEER") #=> 2
Explanation
To see why this [evidently :-)] works, we can look at the results of invoking String#scan, followed by Array#flatten:
"QQQQEEE2ER".scan(r).flatten #=> ["QQQQ", "EEE" , nil ]
"QQQQEEEERR".scan(r).flatten #=> ["QQQQ", "EEEE", "RR"]
"QQAQQEEEER".scan(r).flatten #=> ["QQ" , nil , nil ]
I have a string named "string" that contains six lines.
I want to remove an "Z" from the end of each line (which each has) and capitalize the first character in each line (ignoring numbers and white space; e.g., "1. apple" -> "1. Apple").
I have some idea of how to do it, but have no idea how to do it in Ruby. How do I accomplish this? A loop? What would the syntax be?
Using regular expression (See String#gsub):
s = <<EOS
1. applez
2. bananaz
3. catz
4. dogz
5. elephantz
6. fruitz
EOS
puts s.gsub(/z$/i, '').gsub(/^([^a-z]*)([a-z])/i) { $1 + $2.upcase }
# /z$/i - to match a trailing `z` at the end of lines.
# /^([^a-z]*)([a-z])/i - to match leading non-alphabets and alphabet.
# capture them as group 1 ($1), group 2 ($2)
output:
1. Apple
2. Banana
3. Cat
4. Dog
5. Elephant
6. Fruit
I would approach this by breaking your problem into smaller steps. After we've solved each of the smaller problems, you can put it all back together for a more elegant solution.
Given the initial string put forth by falsetru:
s = <<EOS
1. applez
2. bananaz
3. catz
4. dogz
5. elephantz
6. fruitz
EOS
1. Break your string into an array of substrings, separated by the newline.
substrings = s.split(/\n/)
This uses the String class' split method and a regular expression. It searches for all occurrences of newline (backslash-n) and treats this as a delimiter, splitting the string into substrings based on this delimiter. Then it throws all of these substrings into an array, which we've named substrings.
2. Iterate through your array of substrings to do some stuff (details on what stuff later)
substrings.each do |substring|
.
# Do stuff to each substring
.
end
This is one form for how you iterate across an array in Ruby. You call the Array's each method, and you give it a block of code which it will run on each element in the array. In our example, we'll use the variable name substring within our block of code so that we can do stuff to each substring.
3. Remove the z character at the end of each substring
substrings.each do |substring|
substring.gsub!(/z$/, '')
end
Now, as we iterate through the array, the first thing we want to do is remove the z character at the end of each string. You do this with the gsub! method of String, which is a search-and-replace method. The first argument for this method is the regular expression of what you're looking for. In this case, we are looking for a z followed by the end-of-string (denoted by the dollar sign). The second argument is an empty string, because we want to replace what's been found with nothing (another way of saying - we just want to remove what's been found).
4. Find the index of the first letter in each substring
substrings.each do |substring|
substring.gsub!(/z$/, '')
index = substring.index(/[a-zA-Z]/)
end
The String class also has a method called index which will return the index of the first occurrence of a string that matches the regular expression your provide. In our case, since we want to ignore numbers and symbols and spaces, we are really just looking for the first occurrence of the very first letter in your substring. To do this, we use the regular expression /[a-zA-Z]/ - this basically says, "Find me anything in the range of small A to small Z or in big A to big Z." Now, we have an index (using our example strings, the index is 3).
5. Capitalize the letter at the index we have found
substrings.each do |substring|
substring.gsub!(/z$/, '')
index = substring.index(/[a-zA-Z]/)
substring[index] = substring[index].capitalize
end
Based on the index value that we found, we want to replace the letter at that index with that same letter, but capitalized.
6. Put our substrings array back together as a single-string separated by newlines.
Now that we've done everything we need to do to each substring, our each iterator block ends, and we have what we need in the substrings array. To put the array back together as a single string, we use the join method of Array class.
result = substrings.join("\n")
With that, we now have a String called result, which should be what you're looking for.
Putting It All Together
Here is what the entire solution looks like, once we put together all of the steps:
substrings = s.split(/\n/)
substrings.each do |substring|
substring.gsub!(/z$/, '')
index = substring.index(/[a-zA-Z]/)
substring[index] = substring[index].capitalize
end
result = substrings.join("\n")