From: Ralph Mason <ralph.mason@...>
Date: 2001-10-30T17:55:41+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23824] Re: Probably a simple one

Thanks Joe,

I can see how your expression works however I still mystified by the
behavior of my one.

If  .* will just keep matching to the end of the line then my version should
have returned nil as the whole expression would never have been matched.
But it didn't

I have just been playing with this

z="abc"
z=/(.*b)/    => 0
$1  => "ab"
z=~/(.*)b/ => 0
$1  => "a"

So it seems that .* is matching in this case until it finds the character
following. But in the example below it doesn't.  It seems to randomly stop.

Can anyone clarify this?

Thanks

>
> RM> s="<A  href=\"l.htm\">xxx <IMG  src=\"images/la.gif\" width=4></A>"
> RM> s =~ /<.*A.*href *= *"(.*)".*>/   => 0
> $1   =>>  "l.htm\">xxx <IMG  src=\"images/la.gif"
>
> s = '<A  href="l.htm">xxx <IMG  src="images/la.gif" width=4></A>'
> s =~ /<a\s+href\s*=\s*\"*([^>\"\s]+).*/i
> p $1
>
> the above gets everything between the href= and the > (excluding
> the ending space or quote if there).  Is that what you were looking
> for?
>
> regards,
> -joe
>
>