From: botp <botpena@...>
Date: 2010-07-09T02:01:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Regular expressions, capture repeated groups

On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 12:38 AM, Iain Barnett <iainspeed@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for that. That would certainly work to a degree, much better than my current alternative, but it nullifies the usefulness of named captures. For example, I can't call
>
> $ md1[:first]

wait till you call the 21st ;-)

> and get back all the matches for the (?<first> ) grouping, which would be phenomenally useful, because scan returns arrays of strings and not matchdata.
>

waxman hinted the $~

try eg,


s
#=> "The the quick brown fox  fox jumped over the lazy dog dog."
m=[]
#=> []
s.scan(/((\w+) +\2)/i){|x| m << $~}
#=> "The the quick brown fox  fox jumped over the lazy dog dog."
m.size
#=> 3
m[0]
#=> #<MatchData "The the" 1:"The the" 2:"The">
m[0].offset 0
#=> [0, 7]
m[0].offset

....    and so fort..

best regards -botp