From: Alex Fenton <alex@...>
Date: 2005-10-03T22:31:47+09:00
Subject: Re: split without lookbehind

Thanks all for your suggestions. I had forgotten scan was handy in 
situations like
this - I ended up going with a solution similar to Gavin's (again using 
commas
to avoid toothpick-itis)

str.scan /(?:[^,]|,,)+/

Also helped me see that there are some tricky edge-cases where the separator
character is at the beginning or end of an element - I'm going to 
prohibit this in
the appplication.

cheers
alex

Gavin Kistner wrote:
> On Oct 2, 2005, at 1:06 PM, Alex Fenton wrote:
> 
>> I'm trying to split a path (like an URL, but not one) into bits on  
>> the '/' character.
>> Problem is, I want to be able to be able to escape '/' in the names  
>> of bits by doubling
>> the character to '//' eg
>>
>> 'foo/bar // baz/qux'
>> => ["foo", "bar / baz", "qux"]
> 
> 
> Lookbehind is what you want; until we get it in core ruby, I've  
> provided an example of another way to get the above. I've used commas  
> instead of / just to help make the regexp easier to understand -  
> substitute with "\/" as appropriate:
> 
> str = 'foo,bar ,, baz,qux,,,jorb,jing,,,,blat'
> out = []
> str.scan( /(.+?[^,],{2}*)(?:,(?!,)|$)/ ){ |a,b|
>     out << a.gsub( ',,', ',' )
> }
> p out
> #=> ["foo", "bar , baz", "qux,", "jorb", "jing,,blat"]