From: Chris <chris@...>
Date: 2002-04-04T05:50:13+09:00
Subject: Re: regular expression question

In article <46487A0D3619D511BF860000F6B99827D2C177@PRESGGS17>,
 "Firestone, Mark - Technical Support" 
 <mark.firestone@gossgraphic.co.uk> wrote:

> Regular expressions give me a headache..

They're fun that way...

I decided to think about this a little, and decided to come up with 
something a bit more robust, that would ignore a semi-colon enclosed in 
a string or regexp.  So far the following seems to work.

class String
     def code_split
          re = /(([^;"'\/]+)|([^;]*((["'\/])[^\5]*\5)[^;]*));+/
          deal_with = self.clone
          deal_with += ";" unless deal_with =~ /;+$/
          matches = []
          while deal_with =~ re
               matches << $1
               deal_with.sub! $1, ""
          end
          matches
     end
end

str = "hello_world;a = 'foo bar';b = \"hello ; world\""
p str.code_split