From: Iain 'Spoon' Truskett <spoon@...>
Date: 2002-12-20T10:07:56+09:00
Subject: Re: regex help please please !

* Matthew, Graeme (Graeme.Matthew@mercer.com) [20 Dec 2002 11:49]:

[...]
> How does one do greedy regex's in ruby ? in Perl / Python one has
> access to the /s or .DOTALL option but in ruby I cannot get a greedy
> effect.

That's not what 'greedy' means in regular expressions. You're thinking
of 'multiline mode'.

In Perl, that's /s
In Ruby, that's /m

(one day, someone will explain why Ruby has Perl's /m on by default and
renamed /s to /m; feel free to make that day today)


Greediness is that quantifiers grab as much as they can. e.g. /^.+/
matches all of "foo", not just "f" which /^.+?/ would match.

irb(main):001:0> "foo" =~ /^.+?/; puts $&
f
=> nil
irb(main):002:0> "foo" =~ /^.+/; puts $&
foo
=> nil


cheers,
-- 
Iain.