From: Kenneth McDonald <kenneth.m.mcdonald@...>
Date: 2007-06-03T12:59:24+09:00
Subject: No way of looking for a regrexp match starting from a particular point in a string?

I'm probably just missing something obvious, but I haven't found a way 
to match a regular expression against only part of a string, in 
particular only past a certain point of a string, as a way of finding 
successive matches. Of course, one could do a match against a string, 
take the substring past that match and do a match against the substring, 
and so on, to find all of the matches for the string, but that could be 
very expensive for very large strings.

I'm aware of the String.scan method, but that doesn't work for me 
because it doesn't return MatchData instances.

What I want is just something like regexp.match(string, n), where the 
regexp starts looking for a match at or after position n in the string.


Thanks,
Ken