From: Gavin Kistner <gavin@...>
Date: 2005-09-05T16:13:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Making my Regex less greedy?

On Sep 4, 2005, at 10:11 PM, luke wrote:
> So, {100,#{m.length}}? effectively is now finding the first match,  
> if any
> .... Out of curiosity, is it easy to express "find the 3rd match"?.  
> (Rather
> than saying "find 3 matches").

a) As noted in my example, you can leave the second 'argument' to the  
range quantifier empty, in which case it is unbounded.
a{3,5}   <== find 3-5 'a' chars
a{3,}    <== find at least 3 'a' chars, up to ... well, as many as  
you can

b) String#scan will take a regexp and return an array of all matches  
in the document. (Not as useful if you need the saved sub- 
expressions, however.)