Ruby match first occurrence of string for a gsub replacement - ruby

I have a string let's say http://someUrul.com/someController/SOmeAction?SomeQS=http://someOtherUrl
and I want to replace the first http with https, but not the second, so I end up with https://someUrul.com/someController/SOmeAction?SomeQS=http://someOtherUrl
How can I accomplish this with a simple gsub? The following replaces both.
request.url.gsub(/http:/, "https:")

Use sub, not gsub. gsub is global, sub isn't.

Related

How can I check for repeated strings with check-tail plugin in Sensu?

I am using sensu and the check-tail.rb plugin to alert if any errors appear in my app logs. The problem is that I want the check to be successful if it finds 3 or more error messages.
The solution that I came up with is using a regex like:
\^.*"status":503,.*$.*^.*"status":503,.*$.*^.*"status":503,.*$\im
But it seems to not work because of the match function: instead of passing the variable as a ruby regex it passes it as a string (this can be seen here).
You need to pass the pattern as a string literal, not as a Regexp object.
Thus, you need to remove the regex delimiters and change the modifiers to their inline option variants, that is, prepend the pattern with (?im).
(?im)\A.*"status":503,.*$.*^.*"status":503,.*$.*^.*"status":5‌​03,.*\z
Note that to match the start of string in Ruby, you need to use \A and to match the end of string, you need to use \z anchors.

Ruby gsub! with Regex keep word

I want to turn a string line "variable.to_s" into "str(variable)" using gsub! with regex. I currently have
string = "variable.to_s"
string.gsub!(/\w+\.to_s/,/str(\w)/)
which obviously does not work as you cannot use regex in the second part of gsub, but how do I keep the \w found in the gsub part but replacing the .to_s part?
You're capturing the wrong thing:
string.gsub!(/(\w+)\.to_s/, 'str(\1)')
gsub and gsub! take a string or regular expression as the first argument and a string or block as the second argument. You're sending a regular expression to both.
If you need to use a portion of the match in the second part, capture it with brackets. You did this inadvertently in your code but on the wrong side.

What is the difference between these three alternative ways to write Ruby regular expressions?

I want to match the path "/". I've tried the following alternatives, and the first two do match, but I don't know why the third doesn't:
/\A\/\z/.match("/") # <MatchData "/">
"/\A\/\z/".match("/") # <MatchData "/">
Regexp.new("/\A\/\z/").match("/") # nil
What's going on here? Why are they different?
The first snippet is the only correct one.
The second example is... misleading. That string literal "/\A\/\z/" is, obviously, not a regex. It's a string. Strings have #match method which converts its argument to a regexp (if not already one) and match against it. So, in this example, it's '/' that is the regular expression, and it matches a forward slash found in the other string.
The third line is completely broken: don't need the surrounding slashes there, they are part of regex literal, which you didn't use. Also use single quoted strings, not double quoted (which try to interpret escape sequences like \A)
Regexp.new('\A/\z').match("/") # => #<MatchData "/">
And, of course, none of the above is needed if you just want to check if a string consists of only one forward slash. Just use the equality check in this case.
s == '/'

Regular expression to clean string

I'm struggling to figure out even where to start with this. I believe there is a regular expression to make this a fairly straight forward task. I want to trim off the extra asterisks in a string.
Example string:
test="AM*BE*3***LAST****~"
I would like it to trim asterisks off only the end that don't have repeating symbols. So the resulting value in the variable would be:
test="AM*BE*3***LAST~"
In Perl I was able to use this:
s/\*+~+/~/;
Is there something similar I can do in Ruby? I'm sure there is, just struggling to find it for some reason. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
You could use this regex:
/\*+~$/
Then use the gsub method to replace all matches with a tilde ~:
test = "AM*BE*3***LAST****~"
test.gsub!(/\*+~$/, '~')
# => "AM*BE*3***LAST~"
Or you could use this more flexible regex, which matches any amount of characters after * until end of line:
/\*+([^*])+$/
Then use the first capture group ($1) as the replacement:
test.gsub(/\*+([^*])+$/) { $1 }
Ruby's String class has the [] method, which lets us use regexp as a parameter. We can also assign to that, allowing us to do things like:
foo = "AM*BE*3***LAST****~"
foo[/\*+~+$/] = '~'
foo # => "AM*BE*3***LAST~"
That reuses the match pattern from your Perl search/replace. (I'm assuming you only want to match at the end of the line because of your examples. If it needs to be anywhere in the string remove the trailing $ from the pattern.)
You can use Rubular and try to test the regex and achieve what you need based on the references down the page.
http://rubular.com/

Another way instead of escaping regex patterns?

Usually when my regex patterns look like this:
http://www.microsoft.com/
Then i have to escape it like this:
string.match(/http:\/\/www\.microsoft\.com\//)
Is there another way instead of escaping it like that?
I want to be able to just use it like this http://www.microsoft.com, cause I don't want to escape all the special characters in all my patterns.
Regexp.new(Regexp.quote('http://www.microsoft.com/'))
Regexp.quote simply escapes any characters that have special regexp meaning; it takes and returns a string. Note that . is also special. After quoting, you can append to the regexp as needed before passing to the constructor. A simple example:
Regexp.new(Regexp.quote('http://www.microsoft.com/') + '(.*)')
This adds a capturing group for the rest of the path.
You can also use arbitrary delimiters in Ruby for regular expressions by using %r and defining a character before the regular expression, for example:
%r!http://www.microsoft.com/!
Regexp.quote or Regexp.escape can be used to automatically escape things for you:
https://ruby-doc.org/core/Regexp.html#method-c-escape
The result can be passed to Regexp.new to create a Regexp object, and then you can call the object's .match method and pass it the string to match against (the opposite order from string.match(/regex/)).
You can simply use single quotes for escaping.
string.match('http://www.microsoft.com/')
you can also use %q{} if you need single quotes in the text itself. If you need to have variables extrapolated inside the string, then use %Q{}. That's equivalent to double quotes ".
If the string contains regex expressions (eg: .*?()[]^$) that you want extrapolated, use // or %r{}
For convenience I just define
def regexcape(s)
Regexp.new(Regexp.escape(s))
end

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