Regex to extract all matches of several patterns from a single string in Ruby

Question

After three hours I'm going to stop banging my head on the wall and ask for help. This ought to be an easy regex, but I just can't quite get my mind around it today.

Given a short string and a few different patterns, I need to extract all the matching patterns from the string, where each pattern is a "whole word".

The patterns are: "YES", "NO", "MAYBE", any sequence of asterisks ['*', '**', '***', '...'], any number from 0 to 999, with the case of the text being case-insensitive.

So if s = 'foo yes and no doo 5 boo **** bar far 13 not but no' the result would be ["yes", "no", "5", "****", "13", "no"]

maerics · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-05 00:36:05Z

3

s = 'foo yes and no doo 5 boo * *** bar far 13 not but no YESTERDAY'
ms = s.scan(/(?:\b(?:yes|no|\d{1,3})\b|\*+)/i)
ms # => ["yes", "no", "5", "*", "***", "13", "no"]

edited Feb 5, 2011 at 0:36

answered Feb 5, 2011 at 0:20

maerics

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5 Comments

Dylan Markow Over a year ago

This would hit on the not too.

jpw Over a year ago

yes, it produces that extra "no" from 'not'... ["yes", "no", "5", "", "**", "13", "no", "no", "YES"].I wasnt sure how to tell it to hit only whole words?

maerics Over a year ago

@jpwynn: I overlooked that point in your question, the update should fix it.

jpw Over a year ago

it misses the last 'yes' if it's the end of the string... produces ["yes", "no", "5", "", "**", "13", "no"] from s = 'foo yes and no doo 5 boo * *** bar far 13 not but no YES'

jpw Over a year ago

it's so close... do you do this all day? cuz i find geenrating a regex makes my head hurt!

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