From: Peter Bailey <pbailey@...>
Date: 2007-09-19T00:27:31+09:00
Subject: Re: finding string matches, in order, in a file

William James wrote:
> On Sep 18, 8:28 am, Peter Bailey <pbai...@bna.com> wrote:
>>
>> entry as one that's 300 lines deep into the file. In fact, the results
>> look exactly the same to me.
> 
> Don't give up yet.  A regular expression is a very concentrated
> piece of code, and it very often requires tweeking.
> 
> Can you show us the first entry in the file that should
> be matched?  That would enable us to test our reg.exps.
> 
> Some tricky points.  A . won't match a newline unless
> the m modifier is at the end of the regexp.
> .* will often match too much unless you make it
> non-greedy by appending ? (i.e., .*?).
> Sometimes it's best to make the regexp case-insensitive
> by using the i modifier.
> You may assume that your text will always have
> <issue code=
> but perhaps it has
> <issue  code =
> 
> Try this:
> 
> %q{
> <issueList>
>    <issue code = "BCD"  >
> I'm Issue XIV,
> who are you?
> </issue>
> 
> <issueList><issue code="XYZ">
> I'm Issue XX, are you?
> </issue>
> 
> }.scan(
> /<issueList>\s*<issue +code *= *"[A-Z]{3}" *>(.*?)<\/issue>/m){
>   p $1
> }

Believe me, I haven't given up. I need this to work! I really appreciate 
your perseverance, though. Here's what I have now:

xmlfile.scan(/<issueList>\s*<issue +code *="[A-Z]{3} 
*">(.*?)<\/issue>\n?/mi) do |match|
codes = $1
puts codes
end

My xml file that I'm testing is 2087 lines deep. The first entry in this 
file is on lines 21-23. Here they are:

<issueList>
<issue code="TRD">Trade (Domestic &amp; Foreign)</issue>
</issueList>

So, these words, "Trade (Domestic &amp; Foreign)" should be my first 
entry in my array. But, it continues to come up with the word 
"Immigration" as the first entry in the array, and that's way down on 
line 358.

Thanks,
Peter

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