From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2002-11-02T06:10:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Library consistency

On Sat, 2 Nov 2002 05:57:28 +0900, Maur�cio wrote:
> Hi, guys,
> 
> Just a sugestion: I think it would be a nice idea if all library
> calls that return a regexp match could return a MatchData object.
> Today, /regexp/.match, string.gsub and string.scan all return
> diferent things. Is that a bad idea for some reason?

Each of these has a different purpose, though. Just looking at the
two which appear to be related (gsub isn't related because it's
supposed to return a replaced string):

  % ruby -e 'puts /(..)(..)/.match("cruel world")'
  crue
  cr
  ue

  % ruby -e 'puts "cruel world".scan(/(..)(..)/).join("\n")'
  cr
  ue
  l
  wo

Note that the latter actually returns [['cr', 'ue'], ['l ', 'wo']].
It might be useful to be able to do:

  /(..)(..)/.scan("cruel world")

Which returns an array of MatchData.

-austin
-- Austin Ziegler, austin@halostatue.ca on 2002.11.01 at 16.01.28