From: Eero Saynatkari <ruby-forum-reg@...>
Date: 2005-12-18T22:41:09+09:00
Subject: Re: How to grep the shortly matching in a string

Arowana Lin 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

Yes, you want the non-greedy version .*? instead of .*
there. You can use ? with the *, + and {,} specifiers.


E

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