From: Rob Biedenharn <Rob@...>
Date: 2008-11-14T09:16:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Matching

On Nov 13, 2008, at 5:49 PM, Shandy Nantz wrote:

> As you can imagine the regex wouldn't ketch this expression. So I  
> tried
> this:
>
>    params[:airport][:city].gsub(/$\s/, "")
>      [/(\w|\s)+, [A-Z]{2}|[A-Z][a-z]{1,}\[(.+?)\]/,2]
>
> And al' bee it caught the Torono, Canada[YYZ]. Now, however, it  
> fails to
> get the Denver, CO[DEN]. I must have a complete lack of understanding
> when it comes to regex because I always thought that the "|" in the
> above statement meant "or", as in, try and match TWO A-Z OR one A-Z
> FOLLOWED BY one or more a-z. I guess I am drawing a total blank  
> because
> I look at the revised code above and I think it should match all the
> above cases and I cannot figure out for the life of me where it is
> failing. Can someon ehelp, thanks
>
> -S


Oh, I see part of your problem: You need to group the alternation to  
see what you want.
                      => An UPPER with one or more lowers,
                         followed by some characters within
                         square brackets
                     v---------------------v
/(\w|\s)+, [A-Z]{2}|[A-Z][a-z]{1,}\[(.+?)\]/
  ^----------------^
    => Some word or
       space characters,
       a comma,
       and 2 letters

I think you intended to have:
               v------v
/(\w|\s)+, (?:[A-Z]{2}|[A-Z][a-z]{1,})\[(.+?)\]/
                        ^------------^
Grouped with (?: ) which is a non-capturing group.

(But my earlier message still holds.)

-Rob

Rob Biedenharn		http://agileconsultingllc.com
Rob@AgileConsultingLLC.com