From: James Gray <james@...>
Date: 2008-05-01T23:19:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Regexp help needed

On May 1, 2008, at 3:41 AM, Brubix wrote:

> I have some text documents containing series of questions and answers.
> I need to extract all questions and answers to load a database.
> No problem in reading the text document or writing to the database.
> I need help with the regexps to parse the document (please note that
> some questions and answers extend on two or more lines).

I would probably do it without leaning on regular expressions in this  
case:

   #!/usr/bin/env ruby -wKU

   DATA.each("") do |qna|
     answers  =  qna.to_a
     question =  answers.shift
     question << answers.shift until question.strip[-1] == ??

     puts "Question:  #{question}"
     puts "Answers:"
     puts answers
   end

   __END__
   *1) Is this the first question ?
   a. Yes
   b. No

   *2) Is this question composed
   of two lines ?
   a. Yes, indeed
   b. Maybe
   c. I dont' know

If you really want the regular expression though, this seems to work:

   #!/usr/bin/env ruby -wKU

   DATA.read.scan(/^(\*\d+\) [\s\S]+?\?) *\n((?:^[a-z]. .+?\n)+)/m) do  
|q, a|
     puts "Question:  #{q}"
     puts "Answers:"
     puts a.to_a
   end

   __END__
   *1) Is this the first question ?
   a. Yes
   b. No

   *2) Is this question composed
   of two lines ?
   a. Yes, indeed
   b. Maybe
   c. I dont' know

Hope that helps.

James Edward Gray II