From: Paul Wistrand <pwistrand@...>
Date: 2005-02-18T20:24:55+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie needs help with escaping regex

LOL. As soon as I saw your post I thought to myself "but I tried that". Then
it dawned on me that in my tied state I had escaped the forward slash in the
closing </span> tag but not the </a>! Thanks.


"Zach Dennis" <zdennis@mktec.com> wrote in message
news:42153F6D.6030006@mktec.com...
> Paul Wistrand wrote:
> > Hi,
> >     I have a simple project that I thought I'd have a crack at in Ruby.
I
> > want to retrieve a list of names from a web page but the Ruby
interpreter is
> > giving me allot of trouble in parsing the pattern for the regular
> > expression. The pattern I wanted to use was the following :
> >
> > pattern =
> >
/<span\sclass\s=\s"rankingName"><a\shref="w3xp-player-profile.aspx\?Gateway=
> > ([^&]*)&PlayerName=([^"]*)">((\n|.)*?)</a></span>/
> >
> > understandably the forward slash in the closing span tag causes Ruby to
> > think this is the end of the pattern. Hence my question is how the heck
do I
> > escape this?
> >
> > Thanks
> > Paul
> >
> > B.T.W I realise that following works just as well...
> > pattern =
> >
/<span\sclass\s=\s"rankingName"><a\shref="w3xp-player-profile.aspx\?Gateway=
> > ([^&]*)&PlayerName=([^"]*)">((\n|.)*?)</
>
> Just add a \ slash before all characters you want to escape, in this
> case the forward slashes.
>
> example:
>    rgx = /<\/span>/
>
> HTH,
>
> Zach
>
>