From: Matthew Desmarais <desmarm@...>
Date: 2006-04-06T08:50:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Copying $1.. A loop with two regular expressions

Matthew Desmarais wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> Oky wrote:
>> Hi, sorry if this is a stupid question.. i've only been programming 
>> ruby for about six hours.
>>
>> I'm trying to white a loop to parse through a webpage and get all the 
>> links to other pages. This loop depends on a regular expression to 
>> find all the <a href tags.. but inside the loop there is another 
>> regular expression which looks to see if the link is relative or 
>> static. The problem is the inner regular expression changes the $1 
>> variable so the loop just fails on the first iteration. I've tried 
>> making a copy of the $1 variable but the result just ends up 
>> containing nil.
>>
>> Any help you could offer would be gratefully appreciated
>>
>> Hears my code so far:
>>
>>         loop do
>>              url = $1
>>             puts $1    #A url
>>             puts $url  #Always nil ?
>>   
> Here's _a_ problem for you to start with.  You've assigned the value 
> of 1 to the local variable url.  When you puts $url, you are examining 
> and printing the global variable $url.  Since you haven't assigned 
> anything to $url yet, it is nil.
>
> In Ruby an unadorned name like "url" is either a local variable or 
> method call.  Putting a "$" on the front of something tells Ruby that 
> you want to refer to a global.
>
> So try changing the "$url" to "url" and see what happens.
>
> I hope it's something good.
>
> Matthew
>
Huh.

Try "You've assigned the value of $1 to the local variable url."  
That'll make more sense (maybe).

Sheesh.  Sorry. ;-)