I am attempting to scan the following string with the following regular expression:
text = %q{akdce ALASKA DISTRICT COURT CM/ECFalmdce
ALABAMA MIDDLE DISTRICT COURTalndce
}
p courts = text.scan(/(ECF\w+)|(COURT\w+)/)
Ideally, what I want to do is scan the text and pull the text 'ECFalmdce' and 'COURTalndce'
With the regex I am using, I am trying to say I want a string that starts with either COURT or ECF followed by a random string of characters.
The array being returned is:
[["ECFalmdce", nil], [nil, "COURTalndce"]]
What is the deal with the nil's, does anyone have a more efficient way of writing the regex, and does anyone have a link to further documentation on match groups?
Your regex captures differently for ECF and COURT. You can create non-capture groups with ?:
text.scan(/(?:ECF|COURT)\w+/)
# => ["ECFalmdce", "COURTalndce"]
Edit
About non-capture groups: You can use them to create patterns using parenthesis without capturing the pattern.
They're patterns such as (?:pattern)
You can find more information on regular expressions at http://www.regular-expressions.info/refadv.html
Related
text = 'http://www.site.info www.escola.ninja.br google.com.ag'
expression: (http:\/\/)?((www\.)?\w+\.\w{2,}(\.\w{2,})?)
In Javascript, this expression works, returning:
["http://www.site.info", "www.escola.ninja.br", "google.com.ag"]
Why it's not working in ruby?
For example:
using the Match method:
p text.match(/(http:\/\/)?(www\.)?\w+\.\w{2,}(\.\w{2})?/)
#<MatchData "http://www.site.info" 1:"http://" 2:"www." 3:nil>
using the Scan method:
p text.scan(/(http:\/\/)?(www\.)?\w+\.\w{2,}(\.\w{2})?/)
[["http://", "www.", nil], [nil, "www.", ".br"], [nil, nil, ".ag"]]
How can I return the following array instead?
["http://www.site.info", "www.escola.ninja.br", "google.com.ag"]
Because according to the Ruby String#scan method:
If the pattern contains groups, each individual result is itself an array containing one entry per group.
So you can simply modify the expression so that the groups are non-capturing by converting (...) to (?:...), resulting in the following expression
text.scan(/(?:http:\/\/)?(?:(?:www\.)?\w+\.\w{2,}(?:\.\w{2,})?)/)
# => ["http://www.site.info", "www.escola.ninja.br", "google.com.ag"]
The reason is that str.match(/regex/g) in JS does not keep captured substrings, see MDN String#match() reference:
If the regular expression includes the g flag, the method returns an Array containing all matched substrings rather than match objects. Captured groups are not returned.
In Ruby, you have to modify the pattern to remove redundant capturing groups and turn capturing ones into non-capturing (that is, replace unescaped ( with (?:) because otherwise, only the captured substrings will get output by the String#scan method:
If the pattern contains no groups, each individual result consists of the matched string, $&. If the pattern contains groups, each individual result is itself an array containing one entry per group.
Use
text = 'http://www.site.info www.escola.ninja.br google.com.ag'
puts text.scan(/(?:http:\/\/)?(?:www\.)?\w+\.\w{2,}(?:\.\w{2,})?/)
Output of the demo:
http://www.site.info
www.escola.ninja.br
google.com.ag
I'm attempting to do some substring extraction in Ruby through the use of regular expressions, and running into some issues with the regexp being "overly selective".
Here's the target string I'm attempting to match:
"Example string with 3 numbers, 2 commas, and 6,388 other values that are not included."
What I'm attempting to extract is the numerical values in the statement provided. In order to account for the comma, I came up with the expression /(\d{1,3}(,\d{1,3})*)/.
Testing the following in IRB, this is the code and result:
string = "Example string with 3 numbers, 2 commas, and 6,388 other values that are not included."
puts string.scan(/(\d{1,3}(,\d{1,3})*)/)
=> "[[\"3\", nil], [\"2\", nil], [\"6,388\", \",388\"]]"
What I'm looking for is something along the lines of ["3", "2", "6,388"]. Here's the issues I need help correcting:
Why does Ruby include nil for each match group that is not comma-delimited, and how do I adjust the regular expression/match strategy to remove that and get a "flat" array?
How do I prevent the regular expression from matching a sub-expression of the substring I'm attempting to match (that is, ",388" in "6,388")?
I did attempt to use .match(), but ran into the issue that it simply returned "3" (presumably, the first value matched) with no other information apparent. Attempting to index that with [1] or [2] resulted in nil.
If there's a capturing group in pattern, String#scan returns array of arrays to express all groups.
For each match, a result is generated and either added to the result
array or passed to the block. If the pattern contains no groups, each
individual result consists of the matched string, $&. If the pattern
contains groups, each individual result is itself an array containing
one entry per group.
By removing capturing group or by replacing (...) with non-capturing group (?:...), you will get a different result:
string = "Example string with 3 numbers, 2 commas, and 6,388 other values ..."
string.scan(/\d{1,3}(?:,\d{1,3})*/) # no capturing group
# => ["3", "2", "6,388"]
I need to get an array of floats (both positive and negative) from the multiline string. E.g.: -45.124, 1124.325 etc
Here's what I do:
text.scan(/(\+|\-)?\d+(\.\d+)?/)
Although it works fine on regex101 (capturing group 0 matches everything I need), it doesn't work in Ruby code.
Any ideas why it's happening and how I can improve that?
See scan documentation:
If the pattern contains no groups, each individual result consists of the matched string, $&. If the pattern contains groups, each individual result is itself an array containing one entry per group.
You should remove capturing groups (if they are redundant), or make them non-capturing (if you just need to group a sequence of patterns to be able to quantify them), or use extra code/group in case a capturing group cannot be avoided.
In this scenario, the capturing group is used to quantifiy a pattern sequence, thus all you need to do is convert the capturing group into a non-capturing one by replacing all unescaped ( with (?: (there is only one occurrence here):
text = " -45.124, 1124.325"
puts text.scan(/[+-]?\d+(?:\.\d+)?/)
See demo, output:
-45.124
1124.325
Well, if you need to also match floats like .04 you can use [+-]?\d*\.?\d+. See another demo
There are cases when you cannot get rid of a capturing group, e.g. when the regex contains a backreference to a capturing group. In that case, you may either a) declare a variable to store all matches and collect them all inside a scan block, or b) enclose the whole pattern with another capturing group and map the results to get the first item from each match, c) you may use a gsub with just a regex as a single argument to return an Enumerator, with .to_a to get the array of matches:
text = "11234566666678"
# Variant a:
results = []
text.scan(/(\d)\1+/) { results << Regexp.last_match(0) }
p results # => ["11", "666666"]
# Variant b:
p text.scan(/((\d)\2+)/).map(&:first) # => ["11", "666666"]
# Variant c:
p text.gsub(/(\d)\1+/).to_a # => ["11", "666666"]
See this Ruby demo.
([+-]?\d+\.\d+)
assumes there is a leading digit before the decimal point
see demo at Rubular
If you need capture groups for a complex pattern match, but want the entire expression returned by .scan, this can work for you.
Suppose you want to get the image urls in this string perhaps from a markdown text with html image tags:
str = %(
Before
<img src="https://images.zenhubusercontent.com/11223344e051aa2c30577d9d17/110459e6-915b-47cd-9d2c-1842z4b73d71">
After
<img src="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/111222333/75255445-f59fb800-57af-11ea-9b7a-a235b84bf150.png">).strip
You may have a regular expression defined to match just the urls, and maybe used a Rubular example like this to build/test your Regexp
image_regex =
/https\:\/\/(user-)?images.(githubusercontent|zenhubusercontent).com.*\b/
Now you don't need each sub-capture group, but just the the entire expression in your your .scan, you can just wrap the whole pattern inside a capture group and use it like this:
image_regex =
/(https\:\/\/(user-)?images.(githubusercontent|zenhubusercontent).com.*\b)/
str.scan(image_regex).map(&:first)
=> ["https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1949900/75255445-f59fb800-57af-11ea-9b7a-e075f55bf150.png",
"https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1949900/75255473-02bca700-57b0-11ea-852a-58424698cfb0.png"]
How does this actually work?
Since you have 3 capture groups, .scan alone will return an Array of arrays with, one for each capture:
str.scan(image_regex)
=> [["https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/111222333/75255445-f59fb800-57af-11ea-9b7a-e075f55bf150.png", "user-", "githubusercontent"],
["https://images.zenhubusercontent.com/11223344e051aa2c30577d9d17/110459e6-915b-47cd-9d2c-0714c8f76f68", nil, "zenhubusercontent"]]
Since we only want the 1st (outter) capture group, we can just call .map(&:first)
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 don't think I'll even try to explain this, I don't know the words to, but I'd like to achieve the following:
Given a string like this:
+++>><<<--
I'd like a match to give me: +++, but also match if any of the other characters were in the string consecutively like they are. So if the +++ wasn't there, I'd like to match >>.
I tried using the following regular expression:
([><\-\+]+)
However, given the string above, it would match the entire string, and not the first list of consecutive characters.
If it makes a difference, this is in Ruby (1.9.3).
Not sure about the ruby bit, but you can do this with backreferences in the pattern:
(.)\1+
What this does is to use a capturing group () to capture any character . followed by any number + of the same character \1. The \1 is a backreference to the the first captured group; in a pattern with more capturing groups \2 would be the second captured group and so on.
Java Example
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(.)\\1+");
Matcher m = p.matcher("aaabbccaa");
m.find();
System.out.println(m.group(0)); // prints "aaa"
Ruby Example
# Return an array of matched patterns.
string = '+++>><<<--'
string.scan( /((.)\2+)/ ).collect { |match| match.first }