From: Justin Collins <justincollins@...>
Date: 2007-12-04T11:40:30+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby regexp Match

John Sheahan wrote:
> I am trying to convert some old Perl scripts to Ruby and am stuck at a
> spot where my Perl script is doing a regular expression match on some
> text pulled from a webpage.
>
> In Perl, I was able to grab the text I wanted by putting () around the
> regular expression which represented the data I wanted, then access it
> with the x[0] method.
>
> Is there something like this in Ruby? I was looking through the String
> class and don't really see a method listed to do this.
>
> I want to be able to do a kind of match like:
>
>         m/^Title([a-zA-Z0-9])//g
>
> and access what's inside the () with x[0].
>
> Thanks
>
> jackster
>   

Yes.

irb(main):001:0> result = "Title1".match(/^Title([a-zA-Z0-9])/)
=> #<MatchData:0xb7d90654>
irb(main):002:0> result[1]
=> "1"
irb(main):003:0> $1
=> "1"
irb(main):004:0> Regexp.last_match[1]
=> "1"
irb(main):005:0> $~[1]
=> "1"


http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/MatchData.html

-Justin