From: Stefano Crocco <stefano.crocco@...>
Date: 2008-01-04T06:34:30+09:00
Subject: Re: Why does this code not return what I expect it to?

Alle giovedì 3 gennaio 2008, Stefano Crocco ha scritto:
> Alle giovedì 3 gennaio 2008, Sam Phoneix ha scritto:
> > Heres the code. Why does it miss out the "a" character?
> > ------------------------------------------
> > "This is a test".scan(/\w\w/) {|x| puts x}
> > ------------------------------------------
> > Thanks
>
> I guess because the space before the 'a' is not a word character, so ' a'
> can't match /\w\w/.
>
> Stefano

Actually, the situation is a little more complex than I first thought, because 
there are other characters near spaces which are included in the result. The 
difference comes from the fact that 'a' has a space before and a space after 
it. The character 'i' of 'it', instead, is printed because ' i' doesn't 
match, but 'it' does. With the 'a', there is no matching: neither ' a' 
nor 'a ' match. The same happens for each word containing an odd number of 
characters. For instance, replacing 'is' with 'isx', you don't get the 'x' in 
the output.

Stefano