From: Mike Campbell <michael_s_campbell@...>
Date: 2003-04-24T09:02:35+09:00
Subject: Re: grep and regular expressions in ruby



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Daniel Carrera [mailto:dcarrera@math.umd.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2003 7:28 PM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: Re: grep and regular expressions in ruby

...

> I don't know if this is the Ruby-way or not, but I do think that Ruby's 
> RE's and grep are lacking.  There should be a way to express negation in 
> a regular expression, and there should be a way to express several 
> conditions in grep.  I guess that the complaint over grep really reduces 
> to a complaint over REs.
> 
> IMHO one should be able to type some sort of equivalent to 
> 
>   "/cat/ and not /small/".
> 
> Just like we have "/cat|small/".
> 
> I have found myself wishing for something like that more than once.
> 
> I can see that the exact syntax I wrote can't be made to work, but we can 
> probably find an alternate RE-like syntax.  Perhaps something like:
> 
>  /cat|small/  -> true if matches /cat/ or matches /small/
>  /cat&small/  -> true if matches /cat/ and matches /small/
>  /cat|!small/ -> true if matches /cat/ or does not match /small/
>  /cat&!small/ -> true if matches /cat/ and does not match /small/
> 
> Just my $0.02


Does the "!~" operator help you out here?

"cat" =~ /cat/  => 0
"cat" !~ /cat/  => false