From: Paul Vudmaska <paul@...>
Date: 2004-03-17T01:24:26+09:00
Subject: Re: reg multi match replace

David A. Black wrote:

>Hi --
>
>On Tue, 16 Mar 2004, Simon Strandgaard wrote:
>
>  
>
>>On Tue, 16 Mar 2004 12:18:43 +0900, Paul Vudmaska wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>i'm still a noob and had the need for a simple template system and thot 
>>>it would be a nice learning experience. all i want to do is replace 
>>>{{VALUES}}
>>>with the hash value of the same name eg hValues[VALUES]. So i thot well 
>>>this probably aint easy and i sat down and came up with this
>>>
>>>            @value.gsub!(/(\{\{(.+)\}\})/) {
>>>           
>>>                @values[$2]
>>>            }   
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>A few hints.
>>
>>
>>".+" is greedy. You would want to use non-greedy ".+?"
>>
>>
>>"." is matching anything else than newline, which easily may match too 
>>much. Instead use "\w" which only matches alphanumeric characters.
>>    
>>
>
>Unless your hash keys have non-alphanumeric characters :-)  I don't
>think there's any danger of matching too much, since it will stop at
>the first "}" of a pair.  
>
>Another small suggestion:  it doesn't look like you need two captures (unless
>you're doing something with $1 that isn't revealed here):
>
>  @value.gsub!(/(\{\{(.+?)\}\})/) { @values[$1] }
>
>                      ^^^ 
>                      (or \w+? if wanted)
>
>
>David
>
>  
>
Thanks David, Soon after i fired the email i noticed it did not work on 
lines with 2 tokens {{one}} {{two}} so adding the ? worked great!  About 
the inner capture, the outer one matched {{match}} and i needed just the 
name - match - which matches the hash i pass to the template 
{'match'=>'match value'}. Using @values[$2] matched the inner one. To be 
honest, i did not know what $2 was, when i was considering my 
options(like replacing {}), but then i thot "there's a $1 there must be 
a $2" - and it worked after i put the inner capture.  i thot it was 
great -and  a testament to the goodness of all this! The names that will 
be in the tokens and hashes will be like 'name', 'client.name'. So per 
your suggestion  i changed it to /(\{\{([\w\.]+?)\}\})/ which 
accomodates the dot and is more concise to boot. Appreciate your help :0)

:Paul