From: Rich Kilmer <rich@...>
Date: 2002-09-08T06:32:17+09:00
Subject: RE: Regular expression question

Actually I did not need the - so the /\Adec(?[\w])/ worked great.

Thank you my RegEx guru ;-)

-rich

> -----Original Message-----
> From: dblack@candle.superlink.net 
> [mailto:dblack@candle.superlink.net] 
> Sent: Saturday, September 07, 2002 5:24 PM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: Re: Regular expression question
> 
> 
> Hi --
> 
> On Sun, 8 Sep 2002, Rich Kilmer wrote:
> 
> > As I don't have my copy of Mastering Regular Expressions at 
> home, and 
> > I'm not that good with them (yet :-) I question for the RegEx gurus:
> 
> Answering questions addressed to gurus is usually a guarantee 
> that I'll get it wrong, but I'll try anyway :-)
> 
> > if I want to match "dec" at the beginning of a string how would I do
> > that:
> >
> > /\Adec/
> >
> > matches on string "decimal" and "dec" basically I want 'dec' not 
> > followed by [A-Za-z0-9_-] but anything else is ok (including 'dec' 
> > being the entire string)
> 
> You want a negative lookahead:
> 
>   /\Adec(?![A-Za-z0-9_-])/
> 
> You can shorten it to:
> 
>   /\Adec(?![\w-])/
> 
> the difference being that \w is locale-dependent (which is 
> quite likely good, if you want to avoid all alphanumeric characters).
> 
> 
> David
> 
> -- 
> David Alan Black                      | Register for RubyConf 2002!
> home: dblack@candle.superlink.net     | November 1-3
> work: blackdav@shu.edu                | Seattle, WA, USA
> Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav | http://www.rubyconf.com
> 
>