From: Henrik Nyh <henrik@...>
Date: 2008-10-18T17:23:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Shoes GUI - downloading site, using reg exs on body

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 1:33 AM, Double Minus <nathan.wisman@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was starting with a very basic search, to
> just try to have it pull out every line with "http" in it.
>
> (/^*http\/$/) doesn't work for my reg ex
>
> I get:
>
> rb:23: invalid regular expression; there's no previous pattern, to which
> '*' would define cardinality at 2: /^*http\/$/

See if you can find a good guide to regular expressions -- they're
very useful once you learn them. Your regexp is invalid because "*" in
regexps does not mean "any characters, or no characters", it means
"any, or none, of the preceding character or group". So ".*" (any or
none of any character) is probably what you intended.

You forgot the ":" between "http" and "/" though, if you intended to
match "http:/".

If you're doing real simple HTML munching, regexps can be fine, but
look into Hpricot (http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/).