(Ruby) regex optional matches - ruby

Question

I'm writing a Rack app to split hostnames ending with certain prefixes.
For example, the hostname (and port) hello.world.lvh.me:3000 needs to be split into tokens hello.world, .lvh.me and :3000. Additionally, the prefix (hello.world), suffix (.lvh.me) and port (:3000) are all optional.
So far, I have a (Ruby) regex that looks like /(.*)(\.lvh\.me)(\:\d+)?/.
This successfully breaks the hostname into component parts but it falls down when one or more of the optional components is missing, e.g. for hello.world:3000 or lvh.me:3000 or even plain old hello.world.
I've tried adding ? to each group to make them optional (/(.*)?(\.lvh\.me)?(\:(\d+)?/) but this invariably ends up with the first group, (.*), capturing the entire string and stopping there.
My gut feeling is that this is something which might be solved using lookaround but I'll admit this is a totally new realm of regex for me.

Answer 1

You can try with this pattern:
\A(?=[^:])(.+?)??((?:\.|\A)lvh\.me)?(:[0-9]+)?\z
the lookahead (?=[^:]) checks there is at least one character that is not the : (in other words, not the port alone). This means that at least hello.word or lvh.me is present.
The first group is optional and non-greedy ??, this means that it is matched only when needed.
\A and \z are anchors for the start and the end of the string (when ^ and $ are used for the line)
Note that the character class \d matches all unicode digits in Ruby, but in this case you only need ascii digits. It's better to use [0-9]
Note too that \A(?=[^:])((?>[^l:\n.]+|\.|\Bl|l(?!vh\.me\b))*)((?:\.|\A)lvh\.me)?(:[0-9]+)?\z may be more performant.
online demo

Answer 2

Try ^(.*?)?(\.?lvh\.me)?(\:\d+)?$
I added:
a ? to the first group making the * non-greedy
^,$ to anchor it to the start and end.
a ? to the \. before lvh because you want to match lvh.me:3000 not .lvh.me:3000

Answer 3

A Tokenizing Answer
Just for fun, I decided to see if there was a relatively simple way to do what you wanted without a complicated regular expression. The only regular expressions I used were for splitting and validation.
This works for me with your provided corpus, and several variations.
str = 'hello.world.lvh.me:3000'
tokens = str.split /[.:]/
port = tokens.last =~ /\A\d+\z/ ? ?: + tokens.pop : ''
domain = sprintf '.%s.%s', *tokens.pop(2)
prefix = tokens.join ?.
You'll certainly need to check for empty strings in certain cases, but it seems like it might be more straightforward and/or flexible than a pure regex solution. I find it more readable, anyway. If you truly need a single regular expression, though, I'm sure one of the other answers will help you out.

Answer 4

You could try splitting rather than matching,
irb(main):012:0> "hello.world.lvh.me:3000".split(/\.(?=[^.:]+\.[^:.]+(?::\d+)?$)|:/)
=> ["hello.world", "lvh.me", "3000"]
irb(main):013:0> "hello.world:3000".split(/\.(?=[^.:]+\.[^:.]+(?::\d+)?$)|:/)
=> ["hello.world", "3000"]
irb(main):014:0> "lvh.me:3000".split(/\.(?=[^.:]+\.[^:.]+(?::\d+)?$)|:/)
=> ["lvh.me", "3000"]
irb(main):015:0> "hello.world".split(/\.(?=[^.:]+\.[^:.]+(?::\d+)?$)|:/)
=> ["hello.world"]
irb(main):016:0> "hello.world.lvh.me".split(/\.(?=[^.:]+\.[^:.]+(?::\d+)?$)|:/)
=> ["hello.world", "lvh.me"]

Answer 5

Look, ma, no regex!
def split_up(str)
str.sub(':','.:')
.split('.')
.each_slice(2)
.map { |arr| arr.join('.') }
end
split_up("hello.world.lvh.me:3000") #=> ["hello.world", "lvh.me", ":3000"]
split_up("hello.world:3000") #=> ["hello.world", ":3000"]
split_up("hello.world.lvh.me") #=> ["hello.world", "lvh.me"]
split_up("hello.world") #=> ["hello.world"]
split_up("") #=> []
Steps:
str1 = "hello.world.lvh.me:3000" #=> "hello.world.lvh.me:3000"
str2 = str1.sub(':','.:') #=> "hello.world.lvh.me.:3000"
arr = str2.split('.') #=> ["hello", "world", "lvh", "me", ":3000"]
enum = arr.each_slice(2) #=> #<Enumerator: ["hello", "world", "lvh",
# "me", ":3000"]:each_slice(2)>
enum.to_a #=> [["hello", "world"], ["lvh", "me"],
# [":3000"]]
enum.map { |arr| arr.join('.') } #=> ["hello.world", "lvh.me", ":3000"]