From: gabriele renzi <surrender_it@...1.vip.ukl.yahoo.com>
Date: 2004-04-23T20:09:04+09:00
Subject: Re: [NEWBIE] Extract all occurences from a text

il Fri, 23 Apr 2004 19:53:43 +0900, Michael Weller
<michael@gutschi.de> ha scritto::

>Hi!
>I just can't figure out how to extract all matches from a text file.
>I have a file that looks like this:
>...
><h1>some text i don't want</h1>
><a href="/2004/04/21">Data from 21.4.2004</a><br>
><a href="/2004/04/22">Data from 22.4.2004</a><br>
>...
>I have a pattern /\d{4,}/\\d{2,}/\\d{2,}/ which matches everything in 
>the links' target, but I don't want just the first match or the last 
>one... I searched google and looked in "programming ruby" but couldn't 
>find a solution...
>If you know how this works, please tell me!

you could simply do:

lines=[]
open(filename) do |f|
 lines= f.grep your_regexp
end

even if Actually your regexp does not makes sens to me. 
I believe you want dates, so it should be
 /\d{4}\/\d{2}\/\d{2}/
it seem you escaped wrong characters ( \ instead of / )