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I'm trying to get the first word in this string: Basic (11/17/2011 - 12/17/2011)

So ultimately wanting to get Basic out of that.

Other example string: Premium (11/22/2011 - 12/22/2011)

The format is always "Single-word followed by parenthesized date range" and I just want the single word.

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  • Are you searching for that structure within an arbitrary passage of text? The current question phrasing is giving you answers for finding Basic within Basic (11/17/2011 - 12/17/2011) only. Commented Apr 2, 2012 at 16:23

7 Answers 7

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Use this:

str = "Premium (11/22/2011 - 12/22/2011)"
str.split.first # => "Premium"

The split uses ' ' as default parameter if you don't specify any.
After that, get the first element with first

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3 Comments

Where would the date parameter be in this method?
Like this: "Premium (11/22/2011 - 12/22/2011)".split.first
I think he is expecting variable input. How would you know the "parenthesized date range" is there?
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You don't need regexp for that, you can just use 

str.split(' ')[0]
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This will return the first word whether it appears before a parenthesized date range or not. It also assumed the desired string appears at the beginning of the String.
What happens when the date parameter is not in the string?
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I know you found the answer you are needing but in case anyone stumbles on this in the future, in order to pull the needed value out of a large String of unknown length:

word_you_need = s.slice(/(\b[a-zA-Z]*\b \(\d+\/\d+\/\d+ - \d+\/\d+\/\d+\))/).split[0]
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The \b.*\b by itself matches Basic (11/17/2011 - 12/17/2011), even \b.*?\b matches Basic training.
Good point. I've changed \b.*\b to \b[a-zA-Z]*\b. So that should work unless the intended word has a hyphen or any other special character.
Why not just /(\S*\s+\(\d+\/\d+\/\d+ - \d+\/\d+\/\d+\))/ then?
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This regular expression will match the first word with out the trailing space 

"^\w+ ??"
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If you really want a regex you can get the first group after using this regex:

(\w*) .*
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This matches a string containing just a single space.
The only thing required in your regex is a space, everything else is optional. Therefore a string with a single space matches the space in your regex. Even though '.' will match a space, it won't match it in this case.
Oh, I thought you were saying it will not match a string with more than one space. Yes it does indeed match a string consisting of a single space. But the objective of the regex in the context of this question is to extract a part of the input string (using the parenthesis), not to validate it - the last line of the question suggests that we assume it is valid.
Indeed. You have validated a string containing just a single space and got no data in return. It the goal is to not validate, and get data instead, then \w+ will get you much further than (\w*) .*
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"Single-word followed by parenthesized date range"

'word' and 'parenthesized date range' should be better defined
as, by your requirement statement, they should be anchors and/or delimeters.

These raw regex's are just a general guess. 

\w+(?=\s*\([^)]*\))

or 

\w+(?=\s*\(\s*\d+(?:/\d+)*\s*-\s*\d+(?:/\d+)*\s*\))
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Actually, all you need is:

s.split[0]

...or...

s.split.first
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