From: tietyt@...
Date: 2005-06-23T16:15:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Getting a list of results from one regular expression

First of all, thanks for all that super fast help.  I've never asked a
technical question anywhere before and got such a fast response.

Specifically to Pit Capitain:
Thanks for that tip.  I just googled that and learned what the .*?
does.

Pit Capitain wrote:
> tietyt@gmail.com schrieb:
> > Here's my situation, I've got this long string that contains XML.  I
> > would like to parse it.  Specifically, I want to search this string for
> > all instances of a pattern like /stringAlias="(.*)"/
>
> One additional remark: if the input can contain multiple stringAlias
> expressions on one line, the pattern should be /stringAlias="(.*?)"/
> (note the question mark). You can see the difference if you match a
> string like
>
>    str = "stringAlias=\"one\" bla stringAlias=\"two\""
>
>    p str.scan( /stringAlias="(.*)"/ )
>    # => [["one\" bla stringAlias=\"two"]]
>
>    p str.scan( /stringAlias="(.*?)"/ )
>    # => [["one"], ["two"]]
> 
> Regards,
> Pit