From: Axel Etzold <AEtzold@...>
Date: 2007-06-21T07:49:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Do You Understand Regular Expressions?

> irb(main):001:0> "hello".scan(/.*/)
> => ["hello", ""]
> 
> I was expecting one match, not two, because .* matches everything,
> right? Can someone explain why an empty string is also matched?

String.scan searches for all occurrences of (any number of any 
character) here. So zero occurrences is one match.

You can search for at least one occurrence like this:

"hello".scan(/.+/)

"hello".gsub(/.+/, "P") => 'P' 

As an introduction, I find

http://www.regular-expressions.info/ruby.html

quite instructive for the use of regexps in Ruby.

Best regards,

Axel
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