I want to make an array of results from a string like this one, using a regular expression:
results|foofoofoo\nresults|barbarbarbar\nresults|googoogoo\ntimestamps||friday
Here’s my regex as it stands. It works in Sublime Text’s regex search but not in Ruby:
(results)\|.*?\\n(?=((results\|)|(timestamps\|\|)))
and this would be the desired result:
1. results|foofoofoo
2. results|barbarbar
3. results|googoogoo
Instead I’m getting these weird returns, and I can’t understand it. Why does this not select the result lines?
Match 1
1. results
2. results|
3. results|
4.
Match 2
1. results
2. results|
3. results|
4.
Match 3
1. results
2. timestamps||
3.
4. timestamps||
Here’s the actual code using the regex:
#create new lines for each regex'd line body with that body set as the raw attribute
host_scan.raw.scan(/(?:results)\|.*?\\n(?=((?:results\|)|(?:timestamps\|\|)))/).each do |body|
#lines << Line.new({:raw => body})
end
As Kendall Frey already stated, you are creating too many capture groups. No need to group the first literal “results|”, and no need to group the elements of your alternate group in individual non backreferencing groups. What you are intending to do is this regex:
/results\|.*?(?=\\n(?:results\||timestamps\|\|))/
or, if you don’t mind repeating the \\n part, you can do away with the non-capturing subgroup:
/results\|.*?(?=\\nresults\||\\ntimestamps\|\|)/
– both will return an array of matched values as specified in your question.
I'm guessing it has something to do with capturing groups. If you change all your (...) to (?:...) it will eliminate capturing groups.
Rather than jump to a regex, which is a much more complicated way to get at the data, use split("\n").
text = "results|foofoofoo\nresults|barbarbarbar\nresults|googoogoo\ntimestamps||friday"
ary = text.split("\n")
ary is:
[
"results|foofoofoo",
"results|barbarbarbar",
"results|googoogoo",
"timestamps||friday"
]
Slice that and you can get:
ary[0..2]
=> ["results|foofoofoo", "results|barbarbarbar", "results|googoogoo"]
EDIT:
Based on the comment that there are more carriage returns and complex characters in the strings:
require 'awesome_print'
text = "results|foofoofoo\nmorefoo\nandevenmorefoo\nresults|barbarbarbar\nandmorebar\nandyetagainmorebar\nresults|googoogoo\ntimestamps||friday"
ap text.sub(/\|\|friday$/, '').split('results')[1..-1].map{ |l| 'results' << l }
Which outputs:
[
[0] "results|foofoofoo\nmorefoo\nandevenmorefoo\n",
[1] "results|barbarbarbar\nandmorebar\nandyetagainmorebar\n",
[2] "results|googoogoo\ntimestamps"
]
The answer turned out to lie in the parentheses. Wrapping in parentheses caused it to return the entire match instead of just the tail delimiter.
host_scan.raw.scan(/((?:results\|.*?\\n)(?=(?:results\|)|(?:timestamps\|\|)))/).each do |body|
#lines << Line.new({:raw => body})
end
Related
I'm trying to write a Ruby script that replaces all rem values in a CSS file with their px equivalents. This would be an example CSS file:
body{font-size:1.6rem;margin:4rem 7rem;}
The MatchData I'd like to get would be:
# Match 1 Match 2
# 1. font-size 1. margin
# 2. 1.6 2. 4
# 3. 7
However I'm entirely clueless as to how to get multiple and different MatchData results. The RegEx that got me closest is this (you can also take a look at it at Rubular):
/([^}{;]+):\s*([0-9.]+?)rem(?=\s*;|\s*})/i
This will match single instances of value declarations (so it will properly return the desired Match 1 result), but entirely disregards multiples.
I also tried something along the lines of ([0-9.]+?rem\s*)+, but that didn't return the desired result either, and doesn't feel like I'm on the right track, as it won't return multiple result data sets.
EDIT After the suggestions in the answers, I ended up solving the problem like this:
# search for any declarations that contain rem unit values and modify blockwise
#output.gsub!(/([^ }{;]+):\s*([^}{;]*[0-9.]rem+[^;]*)(?=\s*;|\s*})/i) do |match|
# search for any single rem value
string = match.gsub(/([0-9.]+)rem/i) do |value|
# convert the rem value to px by multiplying by 10 (this is not universal!)
value = sprintf('%g', Regexp.last_match[1].to_f * 10).to_s + 'px'
end
string += ';' + match # append the original match result to the replacement
match = string # overwrite the matched result
end
You can't capture a dynamic number of match groups (at least not in ruby).
Instead you could do either one of the following:
Capture the whole value and split on space
Use multilevel matching to capture first the whole key/value pair and secondly match the value. You can use blocks on the match method in ruby.
This regex will do the job for your example :
([^}{;]+):(?:([0-9\.]+?)rem\s?)?(?:([0-9\.]+?)rem\s?)
But whith this you can't match something like : margin:4rem 7rem 9rem
This is what I've been able to do: DEMO
Regex: (?<={|;)([^:}]+)(?::)([^A-Za-z]+)
And this is what my result looks like:
# Match 1 Match 2
# 1. font-size 1. margin
# 2. 1.6 2. 4
As #koffeinfrei says, dynamic capture isn't possible in Ruby. Would be smarter to capture the whole string and remove spaces.
str = 'body{font-size:1.6rem;margin:4rem 7rem;}'
str.scan(/(?<=[{; ]).+?(?=[;}])/)
.map { |e| e.match /(?<prop>.+):(?<value>.+)/ }
#⇒ [
# [0] #<MatchData "font-size:1.6rem" prop:"font-size" value:"1.6rem">,
# [1] #<MatchData "margin:4rem 7rem" prop:"margin" value:"4rem 7rem">
# ]
The latter match might be easily adapted to return whatever you want, value.split(/\s+/) will return all the values, \d+ instead of .+ will match digits only etc.
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 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")
I tried the following regex in Ruby:
"the foodogand the catlada are mouseing".scan(/\b(?=\w{6,12}\b)\w{0,9}(cat|dog|mouse)\w*/)
but instead of it returning
["foodogand", "catlada", "mouseing"]
I'm getting
[["dog"],["cat]] # the results are also in arrays
What's wrong here?
the results are also in arrays, I could flatten this but is there a way to avoid it?
Use ?: for the last group:
"the foodogand the catlada are mouseing".scan(/\b(?=\w{6,12}\b)\w{0,9}(?:cat|dog|mouse)\w*/)
#=> ["foodogand", "catlada", "mouseing"]
From the docs:
If the pattern contains groups, each individual result is itself an array containing one entry per group.
The ?: makes the group non-capturing, avoiding a nested array.
I would just clean that up a bit by moving the second \b to the end and replacing \w{0,9} with \w* (the lookahead takes care of the length)
"the foodogand the catlada are mouseing".scan /\b(?=\w{6,12})\w*(?:cat|dog|mouse)\w*\b/
#=> ["foodogand", "catlada", "mouseing"]