From: William James <w_a_x_man@...>
Date: 2008-09-17T17:32:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Problem with getting RegEx to work

On Sep 17, 3:19 am, henrik...@gmail.com wrote:
> All,
>
> I'm a novice when it comes to Ruby so I'm hoping that one of you guys
> can explain the following to me.
>
> The following line works as I expected it to and prints "This is a
> test" with one word per line:
> " -XThis -Xis -Xa -Xtest ".scan( /-X(.*?)\s/ ) { |x| puts x }
>
> However this line only prints 4 lines of empty text:
> " -XThis -Xis -Xa -Xtest ".scan( /\s-X(.*?)/ ) { |x| puts x }
>
> Can someone explain this to me?
> Thanks.

* means zero or more, so Ruby gives you
zero characters.

" -XThis -Xis -Xa -Xtest ".scan( /\s-X(\S*)/ )
   ==>[["This"], ["is"], ["a"], ["test"]]