From: "Brian Schröder" <ruby.brian@...>
Date: 2005-10-19T19:39:31+09:00
Subject: Re: attaching code to run on regular expression match

On 19/10/05, Eyal Oren <eyal.oren@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am parsing query expressions, using a regular expression with
> multiple matches in it, e.g. /(\w+):(\w+)/.
>
> I would like some code to execute on the first match (e.g.
> constructing some object out of it) and some other code on the second
> match (e.g. constructing some other object).
>
> I can of course check the array of matches and find the non-nil
> element, and decide which code to execute. But that becomes very
> cumbersome with a large regex (with say 10 different matches).
>
> So I would rather like to attach some code in a match directly, as one
> does in parsing generators, e.g.
> /(\w+:do_method):(\w+:do_other_method)/.
>
> Would something like that be possible in Ruby? I tried searching but
> I'm not sure how such a feature would be called.
>
>

Maybe you can refactor your regexp to be used with scan.

irb(main):001:0> "some words to change".scan(/\w+/) do | w | puts w.upcase end
SOME
WORDS
TO
CHANGE
=> "some words to change"

hth,
Brian

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