From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2008-07-13T06:31:51+09:00
Subject: Re: regular expressions help

Hi --

On Sun, 13 Jul 2008, phlip wrote:

> David A. Black wrote:
>
>>> => ["hi", "hello", "hello world", "hey", "yo"]
>> 
>> That's not quite the result, though:
>
> I suspect I copied the wrong line from my transcript!
>
> But...
>
>> The "'s are returned as part of the string '"hello world"'. Also, you
>> get the wrong result if you have two quoted strings in a row, because
>> of the greediness:
>
>    str = 'hi hello "hello world" "hey yo"'
>    p str.scan(/(?:".*")|(?:\w+)/)
>
> => ["hi", "hello", "\"hello world\" \"hey yo\""] # bad
>
>    p str.scan(/(?:".*?")|(?:\w+)/)
>
> => ["hi", "hello", "\"hello world\"", "\"hey yo\""] # good!

I don't think the OP wanted the literal quotation marks as part of the
results, though. In other words you'd want the third string to be:

    hello world

rather than

    "hello world"


David

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