From: dblack@...
Date: 2005-12-19T01:45:49+09:00
Subject: Re: How to grep the shortly matching in a string

Hi --

On Sun, 18 Dec 2005, Ross Bamford wrote:

> 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 }

array.each {|it| puts it }  ==  puts array  :-)

> 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...

scan returns an array, so just grab it:

   results = s.scan(/.../).flatten  # flatten because of the ()'s

[And yes, everyone who's about to say it, we all know that you cannot
parse arbitrary HTML with a single regular expression.]


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net

"Ruby for Rails", from Manning Publications, coming April 2006!
http://www.manning.com/books/black