From: William James <w_a_x_man@...>
Date: 2007-08-21T06:34:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Regexp: named captures

On Aug 20, 2:44 pm, Ari Brown <a...@aribrown.com> wrote:
> How do named captures in Ruby work? This is what I've tried:
>
> irb(main):001:0> if /(?<name>.+)/ =~ /ari/
> irb(main):002:1> puts $name
> irb(main):003:1> end
> SyntaxError: compile error
> (irb):1: undefined (?...) sequence: /(?<name>.+)/
>          from (irb):3
>
> and if I do this:
>
> irb(main):007:0> if /(<name>.+)/ =~ /ari/
> irb(main):008:1> puts $name
> irb(main):009:1> end
> TypeError: can't convert Regexp into String
>          from (irb):7
>
> I get a Regexp => String error.
>
> Bwah?
> aRi
> -------------------------------------------|
> Nietzsche is my copilot

A work-around:

md = "foo bar".match( /(\w+) (\w+)/ )
    ==>#<MatchData:0x2851ef0>
name, surname = md.captures
    ==>["foo", "bar"]
name
    ==>"foo"
surname
    ==>"bar"