From: James Ponder <james@...>
Date: 2001-04-21T10:45:38+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:13953] regexp

Hi, I'm new to ruby and am coming from a perl background - therefore I
was hoping to use the perlisms in ruby when it came to regexps.

Quite often you have an input line, and you want to pull data out from it
using a regexp.  In perl I would do the following, naming my fields without
ever using $1, $2, etc.:

  if (($key, $val) = $var =~ /^(.+)=(.+)$/) {
    # ...
  }

In ruby, the =~ String instance method returns the position of the match
(which perl does when in scalar context) rather than an array of matches,
so I'm finding it quite difficult to find a way to do the above perl
code, which in my mind is very readable and understandable.

I thought about doing

  key, val = var =~ /^(.+)=(.+)$/ && $~[1..-1]
  if key
    ...

but nobody would be able to read my code (besides I started feeling sick)...

so at the moment I just do:

  if var =~ /^(.+)=(.+)$/
    key, val = $1, $2

but that's no where near as nice as perl's one-liner (and I really hate using
$1, $2 etc.).  Any ideas?


Best wishes, James
-- 
James Ponder; www.squish.net