From: Lars Christensen <larsch@...>
Date: 2008-07-29T19:49:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Can't control regular expressions

On Jul 29, 12:34 pm, Guillermo.Ac...@koiaka.com wrote:
> I need to extract from an html file all the scripts. So I have written the
> following regular expression for a first test:
>
> %r|<script(.+)script>|m
>
> The problem I am having is that the expression takes the first <script and
> the very last script>. So it matches the beginning of the first script in
> the document and the end of the last script in the document with
> everything in the middle. I want to extract just the scripts one by one.
> How do I do it?

You can use the '?' regexp operator to make a lazy match rather than a
greedy.

%r|<script(.+?)script>|m

However, I suggest trying Hpricot for more robust HTML parsing.

Lars