From: Rob Biedenharn <Rob@...>
Date: 2007-06-20T23:36:53+09:00
Subject: Re: trying to use regex

On Jun 20, 2007, at 4:41 AM, Alex Gutteridge wrote:
> On 20 Jun 2007, at 17:15, merrittr wrote:
>> hi i am trying to strip out text between body tags but when  run it i
>> get:
>>
>> rob@rob-laptop:~/ruby$ ./html2.rb
>> ./html2.rb:14: unknown regexp options - bdy
>> ./html2.rb:14: unterminated string meets end of file
>> ./html2.rb:14: parse error, unexpected tSTRING_END, expecting
>> tSTRING_CONTENT or tREGEXP_END or tSTRING_DBEG or tSTRING_DVAR
>>
>> #! /usr/bin/ruby
>>
>>  @h = File.open "test.html"
>>  @response = @h.gets
>>
>>  text = @response.scan(/<body[^>]*>(.+?)</body>/)[0]
>>  puts text
>
> You need to escape the '/' in your regexp, and unless your html  
> file is one line you may need to also add the multiline option:
>
> text = @response.scan(/<body[^>]*>(.+?)<\/body>/m)[0]
>
> Alex Gutteridge
>
> Bioinformatics Center
> Kyoto University

Or you can use the %r{} form of a Regexp literal:

text = @response.scan(%r{<body\b.*?>(.*?)</body>}mi)[0]

\b matches a "word boundary"
m is the multi-line option that causes . to match newlines, too
i is the case insensitive option (so BODY would also be matched)

-Rob

Rob Biedenharn		http://agileconsultingllc.com
Rob@AgileConsultingLLC.com