From: Rob Sanheim <rsanheim@...>
Date: 2007-01-14T12:43:23+09:00
Subject: checking if a string matches a regexp - am I missing something?

I figure that I must be missing something really obvious with this
question.  But here goes:

I want to know if a string matches a regular expression.  I don't care
where the match begins, I don't want a matchdata object, I don't want
to check for nil, I just want a boolean indicating if a string matches
a regexp.  And I want this to be one method call.  From what I can
tell, this is the closest I can get:

reg = /\w/
reg === "string"   # close, but I want to send the message to the
string, not the other way around
("string" =~ reg) >= 0 # ugly
("string" =~ reg) != 0 # still ugly
"string".include? reg # this would seem to follow the ruby way, but it
throws a TypeError

If I'm not missing some other trick to do this, why doesn't include?
just allow regexp's like so many of the other (slice, index, scan,
etc) string methods?

- Rob