From: Paul Lutus <nospam@...>
Date: 2006-09-19T01:26:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Regular expression for string.anotherstring

Pit Capitain wrote:

> Paul Lutus schrieb:
>> Bart Braem wrote:
>>> 
>>> I will try it with:
>>> string =~ /^\w+\.\w+\z/
>>>
>>> But is there a ruby operator to look for matches on the entire string?
>> 
>> string =~ /^\w+\.\w+$/
>> 
>> Must match the entire string. Because of multiline issues, where that is
>> a factor, you can always split on newlines in advance of this test to be
>> sure you are matching the entire string unambiguously.
> 
> This would be unnecessarily complex.

Not really.

-----------------------------------

#!/usr/bin/ruby

s = "this is\na test\nstring."

a = []

a << s.sub(/(^.*$)/,"\\1")

a << s.sub(/(^.*\z)/,"\\1")

a << s.sub(/(^.*$)/m,"\\1")

a << s.sub(/(^.*\z)/m,"\\1")

a.each do |s|
  puts "[#{s}]"
end

-----------------------------------

Output:

[this is
a test
string.]
[this is
a test
string.]
[this is
a test
string.]
[this is
a test
string.]

> Just use Bart's regexp (with \z 
> instead of $). It matches the entire string.

My point is that, if there are embedded linefeeds and they are an issue,
they must be dealt with. Also, I don't immediately see a difference in
behavior between \z and $, contrary to the documentation's specification
that one matches the end of a line and the other matches the entire string.

-- 
Paul Lutus
http://www.arachnoid.com