From: Alex Young <alex@...>
Date: 2007-01-26T23:31:11+09:00
Subject: Re: simple question about Ruby Regext

Peter Bailey wrote:
> Alex Young wrote:
>> Peter Bailey wrote:
>>> This is driving me nuts. Why isn't the RUBY response "=>2?" There are
>>> two "an" stubs in "banana."
>> The number returned is the position of the start of match, not the
>> number of them.
>>
>>> I thought that RUBY, like PERL, is inherently greedy and it would find
>>> all instances of said regex expression.
>> It is...  there's only one match, and it matches everything from the
>> first 'a' to the end of the string.
>>
>> Hope this makes sense,
> 
> Thanks, Gentlemen. I'll watch my spelling of Ruby and Perl from now on.
> 
> I understand now that my match is only looking for the position. Cool. 
> Thanks. But, . . ., here's a similar regex where I don't want the 
> position, but I want to change all instances of the stub, and, it's only 
> changing the first one.
> 
> "banana".sub(/an/, "ze")
> => "bzeana"
That's explicitly what sub is for - only changing the first one.  You 
want gsub.

-- 
Alex