From: Robert Read <rread@...>
Date: 2000-12-21T05:25:01+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:7792] Re: Regex array subscripts

I'm still a nuby, but I'll give this shot. I believe regular
expressions are treated differently when they are used for indexing
arrays.  So this:


s[/\d+/] 

returns the first match in s, and the return value of /\d+/ is
not really known or important. This 

a =~ /\d+/ 

returns the first index of the matched string in s.  Perhaps another
way of looking at it is regexps don't have return values, because
the expression a regexp is used in has the return value.

robert


On Thu, Dec 21, 2000 at 05:06:44AM +0900, craig duncan wrote:
> I'm just a Ruby-nuby and sparse documentation has me trying to construct
> my own (deeper) explanations for why things work the way they do.  wrt:
> 
> "one 123 two"[/\d+/]   =>  "123"
> 
> even more simply we have:
> 
> "one 123 two"['e 1']   =>  "e 1"
> 
> So, what is confusing is when the documentation says:
> 
> "Arrays are ordered, integer-indexed collections of any object."
> 
> It appears that an integer index is only one way of accessing array
> elements.  Which is what had me confused, because i was led to think
> that /\d/ and /\d+/ both return an (the same) integer.  But apparently
> they return the matched string, which works just fine as an array
> index.  Wierd.