From: Ross Bamford <rosco@...>
Date: 2005-12-18T22:32:46+09:00
Subject: Re: How to grep the shortly matching in a string

On Sun, 18 Dec 2005 11:26:12 -0000, Arowana Lin <priceagle@gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Robert Retzbach wrote:
>> Arowana Lin schrieb:
>>
>>> I used regular expression to grep content from a web page,but it seems
>>> ruby always match the longest string,but I need to fetch the shortly
>>> matching. How can I do ?
>>> Thanks for help!
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> Would be nice to see the regexp. Maybe using non-greedy multipliers will
>> do.
>> You could also use character classes like [^<>] to match chars between <
>> and >.
>> But I don't know what you want to match, so please show me :>
>
> Thanks Robert!
> here is the example.
> <tr><td>Format</td></tr><tr><td>Format2</td></tr><tr><td>Format3</td></tr>
> I use the code below to fetch "Format" and "Format2" in the table
> feature=content.scan(/[<tr><td>([\w\s])*<\/td><\/tr>/)
> I want to get each row into array feature,like
> feature[0]=Format;feature[1]=Format2...
> but it match all the row into
> feature[0]=Format</td></tr><tr><td>Format2</td></tr><tr><td>Format3
>
>

Non greedy quantifiers  could probably be used to do this, but given that  
your data is quite nicely delimited you may as well just scan  ;)

	s =  
"<tr><td>Format</td></tr><tr><td>Format2</td></tr><tr><td>Format3</td></tr>"
	s.scan(/<td>([^<]*)<\/td>/) { |it| puts it }

outputs:

	Format
	Format2
	Format3
	=>  
"<tr><td>Format</td></tr><tr><td>Format2</td></tr><tr><td>Format3</td></tr>"

Obviously it doesn't do quite what you want (you need an array) but that  
part should be easy to add...

-- 
Ross Bamford - rosco@roscopeco.remove.co.uk