Help with regex

[Lucas Fialho]

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

Hello everyone.
I'm trying to match the following pattern:

Text1\n
Text2\n
Text3---

Please note that Text3 can contain \n.
I tried using this regex:

/(.*?)\n(.*?)\n(.*?)---/

The pattern matches and I have three matches, but they're like this:

match[0] => "Text2\nText3---"
macth[1] => 'Text2'
match[2] => 'Text3'

How can I get the first one to be 'Text1' ?

[Louis-Philippe]

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

try putting word metacharacter instead of an any metacharacter

\w*

instead of

*

2009/11/26 Lucas Fialho <lucasfaz...@gmail.com>

[Benoit Daloze]

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

s = "Text1\n
Text2\n
Text3---"

irb(main):036:0> s.scan( /(\w+?)(?:\n|-+)/ )
=> [["Text1"], ["Text2"], ["Text3"]]

Usually, it's easier to use scan when you feel your code in the Regexp gonna
be repeated.
If the text is so simple, you could iterate which String#each_line, and then
remove any '-' at the end.

2009/11/26 Lucas Fialho <lucasfaz...@gmail.com>

[Lucas Fialho]

[Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]

thanks guys. I did not know about string scan!

2009/11/26 Benoit Daloze <ereg...@gmail.com>

[Robert Klemme]

On 11/27/2009 02:37 AM, Lucas Fialho wrote:
> [Note: parts of this message were removed to make it a legal post.]
>
> thanks guys. I did not know about string scan!

If you know there are always three groups you can also do:

irb(main):006:0> s="t1
irb(main):007:0" t2
irb(main):008:0" t3---"
=> "t1\nt2\nt3---"
irb(main):009:0> /([^\n]+)\n([^\n]+)\n([^\n]+)---/ =~ s
=> 0
irb(main):010:0> $1
=> "t1"
irb(main):011:0> $2
=> "t2"
irb(main):012:0> $3
=> "t3"

Cheers

robert

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