From: "Jesús Gabriel y Galán" <jgabrielygalan@...>
Date: 2010-01-22T20:41:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Parse a String

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 12:32 PM, Sean Warburton
<sean_warburton@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I wonder if someone would be able to help.
>
> Through necessity I'm learning Ruby and trying to write my own script
> and while I am getting there and grasping things more, I'm still on
> first rung of the ladder and finding things difficult so please be
> patient ;)
>
> Part of my script involves opening a telnet session and then sending a
> whois request that returns a lot of text ...
>
> I've managed to get to the point where I have the reply stored in a
> variable but what I would now like to do is parse the variable for bits
> of the information and I have read and read but can't find something
> that I seem to be able to understand.
>
> I have attached a text file with the data that my variable holds and I
> need to parse out things like the "Renewal date:" and "Registration
> status:". Would anyone be able to offer me some help on how I should go
> about parsing.

You should a bit about regular expressions. If the text has "simple"
rules, regexes are usually enough to extract the pieces of data you
need. In your case, for example:

irb(main):001:0> data =<<EOF
irb(main):002:0"     Domain name:
irb(main):003:0"         suburbia.co.uk
irb(main):004:0"
[...]

irb(main):053:0> m = data.match(/Renewal date:\s+(.*)/)
=> #<MatchData "Renewal date:  28-Oct-2009" 1:"28-Oct-2009">
irb(main):054:0> m[1]
=> "28-Oct-2009"

If your case is as simple as this, the above solution could be enough.

Hope this helps,

Jesus.