From: Johnny Morrice <spoon@...>
Date: 2011-05-27T02:43:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Need help bringing select array lines together

> The code reads in each line of an array, looks for a closing/ending "
> and puts multiple lines into one element of another array if they are
> part of the same string.

Do you need to handle nested strings?

Here is a crude solution that doesn't.  I tried it on 1.9.2

# The messy input
mess = [ " \"Only one line.\"", " \"line 1 ", " line 2.\"" ]

# A single string, from the mess concatenated
single = mess.join ""
# Find all matches of the regex
matches = single.scan /("[^"]*")/
# Flatten those results,
# to get lines
lines = matches.flatten

# Pretty print the lines
p lines

I don't think any regex, being a finite automaton, could handle nested
strings properly.

Have you considered writing a small lexer and parser?  You may be
better doing that, can handle weirder strings too.

Cheers,
Johnny