From: shaobo.li@...
Date: 2005-02-13T13:25:01+09:00
Subject: duplicated  match question

Hi,

I am new to Ruby,and confusing about following regular patterns:

why pattern "(\w)\1" match duplicated letter "ll"  in "Hello"

and "(\w+)\1" match "ississ" in  "Mississippi"?

# match duplicated letter
showRE('He said "Hello"', /(\w)\1/)  � He said "He<<ll>>o"
# match duplicated substrings
showRE('Mississippi', /(\w+)\1/)  � M<<ississ>>ippi

def showRE(str,pt)
  md=str.match(pt)
  if str=~pt
    puts "#{$`}<<#{$&}>>#{$'}"
  else
    puts "no match"
  end
end

any explanation will be great thanks !