Parsing out a grouping of parentheses with ruby regular expressions - ruby

I am trying to get an array of tokens such as "((token 1))", "((token 2))". I have the following code:
sentence = "I had a ((an adjective)) sandwich for breakfast today. It oozed all over my ((a body part)) and ((a noun))."
token_arr = sentence.scan(/\(\(.*\)\)/)
# => ["((an adjective))", "((a body part)) and ((a noun))"]
The above code does not stop the match when it runs into the first occurrence of "))" in the sentence "It oozed...". I think I need a negative lookahead operator, but I'm not sure if this is the right approach.

Typical problem. Use non-greedy quantifier.
sentence.scan(/\(\(.*?\)\)/)
Alternatively, replace /./ with "things other than ")"":
sentence.scan(/\(\([^)]*\)\)/)

try this regex which will only pull non round brackets from the matched inner text
[(]{2}([^()]*)[)]{2}

Related

regular expression in Ruby with parentheses and match

In Ruby,
x = "this is a test".match(/(\w+) (\w+)/)
puts x[0], x[1], x[2]
why is the output
this is
this
is
Nothing special is going on here. You have the pattern
(\w+) (\w+)
namely two words separated by a space. That would be "this is" in your example (since we start looking for matches from the beginning of the string). The full match goes into the zeroth element of the return value, in your case x[0].
Now parentheses capture matches. The first left parenthesis starts at the first word, namely "this" so that value goes into x[1]. The second left parenthesis starts a group that matches the word "is", which will be captured into x[2].
Again, nothing special. This is how regular expression matching and grouping work in many, many languages.

String#scan not capturing all occurrences

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.

Ruby Regex Match Between "foo" and "bar"

I have unfortunately wandered into a situation where I need regex using Ruby. Basically I want to match this string after the underscore and before the first parentheses. So the end result would be 'table salt'.
_____ table salt (1) [F]
As usual I tried to fight this battle on my own and with rubular.com. I got the first part
^_____ (Match the beginning of the string with underscores ).
Then I got bolder,
^_____(.*?) ( Do the first part of the match, then give me any amount of words and letters after it )
Regex had had enough and put an end to that nonsense and crapped out. So I was wondering if anyone on stackoverflow knew or would have any hints on how to say my goal to the Ruby Regex parser.
EDIT: Thanks everyone, this is the pattern I ended up using after creating it with rubular.
ingredientNameRegex = /^_+([^(]*)/;
Everything got better once I took a deep breath, and thought about what I was trying to say.
str = "_____ table salt (1) [F]"
p str[ /_{3}\s(.+?)\s+\(/, 1 ]
#=> "table salt"
That says:
Find at least three underscores
and a whitespace character (\s)
and then one or more (+) of any character (.), but as little as possible (?), up until you find
one or more whitespace characters,
and then a literal (
The parens in the middle save that bit, and the 1 pulls it out.
Try this: ^[_]+([^(]*)\(
It will match lines starting with one or more underscores followed by anything not equal to an opening bracket: http://rubular.com/r/vthpGpVr4y
Here's working regex:
str = "_____ table salt (1) [F]"
match = str.match(/_([^_]+?)\(/)
p match[1].strip # => "table salt"
You could use
^_____\s*([^(]+?)\s*\(
^_____ match the underscore from the beginning of string
\s* matches any whitespace character
( grouping start
[^(]+ matches all non ( character at least once
? matches the shortest possible string (non greedy)
) grouping end
\s* matches any whitespace character
\( find the (
"_____ table salt (1) [F]".gsub(/[_]\s(.+)\s\(/, ' >>>\1<<< ')
# => "____ >>>table salt<<< 1) [F]"
It seems to me the simplest regex to do what you want is:
/^_____ ([\w\s]+) /
That says:
leading underscores, space, then capture any combination of word chars or spaces, then another space.

Ruby regular expression

Apparently I still don't understand exactly how it works ...
Here is my problem: I'm trying to match numbers in strings such as:
910 -6.258000 6.290
That string should gives me an array like this:
[910, -6.2580000, 6.290]
while the string
blabla9999 some more text 1.1
should not be matched.
The regex I'm trying to use is
/([-]?\d+[.]?\d+)/
but it doesn't do exactly that. Could someone help me ?
It would be great if the answer could clarify the use of the parenthesis in the matching.
Here's a pattern that works:
/^[^\d]+?\d+[^\d]+?\d+[\.]?\d+$/
Note that [^\d]+ means at least one non digit character.
On second thought, here's a more generic solution that doesn't need to deal with regular expressions:
str.gsub(/[^\d.-]+/, " ").split.collect{|d| d.to_f}
Example:
str = "blabla9999 some more text -1.1"
Parsed:
[9999.0, -1.1]
The parenthesis have different meanings.
[] defines a character class, that means one character is matched that is part of this class
() is defining a capturing group, the string that is matched by this part in brackets is put into a variable.
You did not define any anchors so your pattern will match your second string
blabla9999 some more text 1.1
^^^^ here ^^^ and here
Maybe this is more what you wanted
^(\s*-?\d+(?:\.\d+)?\s*)+$
See it here on Regexr
^ anchors the pattern to the start of the string and $ to the end.
it allows Whitespace \s before and after the number and an optional fraction part (?:\.\d+)? This kind of pattern will be matched at least once.
maybe /(-?\d+(.\d+)?)+/
irb(main):010:0> "910 -6.258000 6.290".scan(/(\-?\d+(\.\d+)?)+/).map{|x| x[0]}
=> ["910", "-6.258000", "6.290"]
str = " 910 -6.258000 6.290"
str.scan(/-?\d+\.?\d+/).map(&:to_f)
# => [910.0, -6.258, 6.29]
If you don't want integers to be converted to floats, try this:
str = " 910 -6.258000 6.290"
str.scan(/-?\d+\.?\d+/).map do |ns|
ns[/\./] ? ns.to_f : ns.to_i
end
# => [910, -6.258, 6.29]

How to remove the first 4 characters from a string if it matches a pattern in Ruby

I have the following string:
"h3. My Title Goes Here"
I basically want to remove the first four characters from the string so that I just get back:
"My Title Goes Here".
The thing is I am iterating over an array of strings and not all have the h3. part in front so I can't just ditch the first four characters blindly.
I checked the docs and the closest thing I could find was chomp, but that only works for the end of a string.
Right now I am doing this:
"h3. My Title Goes Here".reverse.chomp(" .3h").reverse
This gives me my desired output, but there has to be a better way. I don't want to reverse a string twice for no reason. Is there another method that will work?
To alter the original string, use sub!, e.g.:
my_strings = [ "h3. My Title Goes Here", "No h3. at the start of this line" ]
my_strings.each { |s| s.sub!(/^h3\. /, '') }
To not alter the original and only return the result, remove the exclamation point, i.e. use sub. In the general case you may have regular expressions that you can and want to match more than one instance of, in that case use gsub! and gsub—without the g only the first match is replaced (as you want here, and in any case the ^ can only match once to the start of the string).
You can use sub with a regular expression:
s = 'h3. foo'
s.sub!(/^h[0-9]+\. /, '')
puts s
Output:
foo
The regular expression should be understood as follows:
^ Match from the start of the string.
h A literal "h".
[0-9] A digit from 0-9.
+ One or more of the previous (i.e. one or more digits)
\. A literal period.
A space (yes, spaces are significant by default in regular expressions!)
You can modify the regular expression to suit your needs. See a regular expression tutorial or syntax guide, for example here.
A standard approach would be to use regular expressions:
"h3. My Title Goes Here".gsub /^h3\. /, '' #=> "My Title Goes Here"
gsub means globally substitute and it replaces a pattern by a string, in this case an empty string.
The regular expression is enclosed in / and constitutes of:
^ means beginning of the string
h3 is matched literally, so it means h3
\. - a dot normally means any character so we escape it with a backslash
is matched literally

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