From: Armin Roehrl <armin@...>
Date: 2004-04-14T07:43:18+09:00
Subject: Re: New Ruby questions...


>
>1. How can a regexp get the longer of two possibilities that are 
>ambiguous? For example, I need to be able to strip out register names:
>
>registers = '(r0|r1|r2|r3...|r10|r11|r12...)'
>
>In the regular expression, how can I get it to find r10 or r11 instead of 
>stopping at r1? 
>
register =~ /(r\d{2,})/
p $1 #-> r10

\d is for a digit character
{m,n} at least m and at most n repetitions of the preceding

more info:
http://dev.faeriemud.org/ruby-uguide/uguide05.html
http://www.rubycentral.com/ref/ref_c_regexp.html