From: James Gray <james@...>
Date: 2008-12-02T04:37:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Regular Expressions

On Dec 1, 2008, at 1:08 PM, Mmcolli00 Mom wrote:

> Hi everyone.

Hello.

> Just a question about regualar expression in Ruby. Is there a way to
> check in each line of a document for always beginning with "23430000"
> and somewhere on that same line another string 'CodeRed'?

Sure.

> line1: 23430000 @#$#$3455000CodeRed 24AAWERE 740000000
>
> This is what I have so far when I import each textdata from another
> file.
>
>
> textdata.should =~ /23430000/ |CodeRed/

   textdata.should =~ /\A23430000.*CodeRed/

My changes are simple:

* \A is a regex atom the only matches at the beginning of the input.   
I used this to make sure 23430000 is at the beginning of the line and  
not later.
* .* matches zero or more of pretty much anything.  Newlines are the  
only character excluded.  Thus this allows anything to appear between  
the number and CodeRed.

Now the regex above really just checks one line.  If you want to check  
all lines, you'll want something like:

   textdata.each do |line|
     line.should =~ /\A23430000.*CodeRed/
   end

Hope that helps.

James Edward Gray II