From: "Thomas B." <tpreal@...>
Date: 2008-09-26T23:23:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Short question on regex in Ruby

Chris Ro wrote:
> place1 = string1.gsub(/.*(\d+)th.*/,'\1')

Hello. I think your approach with using gsub is not the best possible 
here. It's better to simply find the matching part using match and 
substitute it for the whole string, like this:
place1 = string1.match(/(\d+)th\b/)[1]
The \b ensures that the next character after 'th' is not a word 
character (\b is word boundary), and [1] at the end is extracting the 
first bracketed group. It also makes it possible to skip the .* at both 
ends, which is a bit ugly.

Apart from that, a useful piece of knowledge about regexps: 
/.*?(\d+)th.*/ will match what you want, because the first .*? will be 
reluctant to eat up more characters, so it will pass to \d+ as many 
digits as it can.

TPR.
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