From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2008-07-13T06:17:38+09:00
Subject: Re: regular expressions help


From: "phlip" <phlip2005@gmail.com>
> 
>     p str.scan(/(?:".*")|(?:\w+)/)
> 
>  => ["hi", "hello", "\"hello world\"", "hey", "yo"]

Probably want:

str.scan(/(?:"[^"]*")|(?:\w+)/)

...else the greediness will extend over multiple quoted
strings...

'hi hello  "hello world" hey yo "marmoset knocked you out" foo bar'
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

vs.

'hi hello  "hello world" hey yo "marmoset knocked you out" foo bar'
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^


> I'm not sure why one version capture the "" marks and the
> other did not...

Strange... They both did, on my system...(?)

BTW, in ruby 1.9, we have lookbehind, so we can avoid picking
up the quotes, with:

str.scan(/(?:(?<=")[^"]*(?="))|(?:\w+)/)


Regards,

Bill