From: Mark Thomas <ruby@...>
Date: 2008-08-13T23:37:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Regular expression: anything except

On Aug 13, 10:10 am, Gunther Gunt <gunther.theve...@airbus.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am trying to create a regular expression with the following rule:
>
> my text is:
> <TEXT id=''>blabla</TEXT>
> I want to replace <TEXT*> with something
>
> "<TEXT id=''>".gsub(/the magic regular expression/,"replacement")
> ==> replacementblabla</TEXT>
>
> but i want also that
> "<TEXT>blabla</TEXT>".gsub(/the magic regular expression/,"replacement")
> returns the same result
> ==> replacementblabla</TEXT>
>
> and
> <TEXT *anything*>blabla</TEXT>".gsub(/the magic regular
> expression/,"replacement")
> returns the same result
> ==> replacementblabla</TEXT>
>
> Can you help me ?

Sure. Since it looks like XML, I recommend using an XML parser. It not
a good idea to parse XML with regular expressions; doing it robustly
is difficult, as there are many details that can trip you up.

What you want is the text content of the TEXT element. Try this:

require 'hpricot'
xml = Hpricot::XML('<TEXT id="foo" anything="whatever">blabla</TEXT>')
puts xml.search("//TEXT").text

# => "blabla"

- Mark.