# Finding a sentence (more than one word & punctuation (, . ;) **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [January 11, 2006, 8:09am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/finding-a-sentence-more-than-one-word-punctuation/52131 "2006-01-11T08:09:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Kev\_J](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/2bfe46/32.png) [@Kev\_J](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Kev_J)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2006, 8:09am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/finding-a-sentence-more-than-one-word-punctuation/52131/1 "2006-01-11T08:09:38Z")
given this string " \message \the message to echo. \Yes, unless data is included in a character section within this element. " how can I get this result [“message”, “the message to echo.”, “Yes, unless data is included in a character section within this element.”] ? I’ve tried scan + regexp, but the best I’ve got so far is [[“message”]] with this r.scan(/"\>(\w+\s\*)\/) Thanks Kev ---
**Author:** ![Kev\_J](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/2bfe46/32.png) [@Kev\_J](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Kev_J)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2006, 11:01am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/finding-a-sentence-more-than-one-word-punctuation/52131/2 "2006-01-11T11:01:37Z")
Kev J. wrote: > Thanks > Kev If you really want sentences, this will work: > > s.scan /\w+(?:[\s,]+\w+)\*[.;?!]/ > > =\> [“the message\nto echo.”, “Yes, unless data is\nincluded in a > > character > > section within this element.”] > > > s.scan /\w+(?:,?\s+\w+)\*[.;?!]/ > > =\> [“the message\nto echo.”, “Yes, unless data is\nincluded in a > > character > > section within this element.”] Kind regards ``` robert ``` ---
**Author:** ![Kev\_J](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/2bfe46/32.png) [@Kev\_J](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Kev_J)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2006, 12:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/finding-a-sentence-more-than-one-word-punctuation/52131/3 "2006-01-11T12:05:05Z")
On Jan 11, 2006, at 8:08, Kev J. wrote: > in a character section within this element."] > There have been several simple approaches proposed in this thread > that may work for what you want. Just in case, if you needed > something more robust you could have a glance at existing Perl > modules that solve this problem like Lingua::EN::Sentence. – fxn ---
**Author:** ![Kev\_J](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/2bfe46/32.png) [@Kev\_J](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Kev_J)\ **Post date:** [January 11, 2006, 5:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/finding-a-sentence-more-than-one-word-punctuation/52131/4 "2006-01-11T17:45:29Z")
Kev J. wrote: > Thanks > Kev if this is an HTML table extraction thing, rubyful soup is the easiest way to do it [http://www.crummy.com/software/RubyfulSoup/documentation.html](http://www.crummy.com/software/RubyfulSoup/documentation.html) there’s also the htmltokenizer.getText() method, (which i just now discovered by googling) which allows you to extract from before 1 tag at a time [http://htmltokenizer.rubyforge.org/doc/](http://htmltokenizer.rubyforge.org/doc/) [http://htmltokenizer.rubyforge.org/doc/](http://htmltokenizer.rubyforge.org/doc/) ---
**Author:** ![Kev\_J](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/2bfe46/32.png) [@Kev\_J](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Kev_J)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2006, 2:24am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/finding-a-sentence-more-than-one-word-punctuation/52131/5 "2006-01-12T02:24:39Z")
Gene T. wrote: > > > > there’s also the htmltokenizer.getText() method, (which i just now > discovered by googling) which allows you to extract from before 1 tag > at a time > [http://htmltokenizer.rubyforge.org/doc/](http://htmltokenizer.rubyforge.org/doc/) > [http://htmltokenizer.rubyforge.org/doc/](http://htmltokenizer.rubyforge.org/doc/) That is indeed what the problem domain is (did the give it away!). Basically I have a whole lot of html files and I need to re-write them as xml (sort of docbook-ish, but not quite). I’m using builder (fantastic bit of kit by the way), but my original files sometimes contain things like ``` "append Append to an existing file (or open a new file / overwrite an existing file)? \No - default is false." And anything I try basically means that I end up with either nothing extracted or the whole table extracted! My thoughts were to try a simple conversion and then fix things manually afterwards (ie get 95% of the conversion done through a script and then apply some elbow grease to finish off the parts that take too much time to work out) I’m now off to read about this tokenizer ^^^ and see if it does what I want - obviously I’d love to have an automated solution (there are 1000+ html docs I need to convert). I must admit to beginning to loathe HTMLs lack of structural information - if this was a docbook file I’d have very few problems converting it (I could choose many options), but html is so limited in its ability to express what meaning some section has [sigh] Thanks to all for the suggested regexps - I never intended it to become a mini Ruby Q. 🙂 Kev ---
**Author:** ![Kev\_J](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/2bfe46/32.png) [@Kev\_J](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Kev_J)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2006, 6:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/finding-a-sentence-more-than-one-word-punctuation/52131/6 "2006-01-12T18:50:10Z")
A quick scan says that you’ve got legit xml there, why not use REXML? It’s included in the ruby standard libs. Or any of the above html/xml parsing libraries with xpath to pluck your values out. REXML Docs: [http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/](http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/) REXML Homepage: [http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml](http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml) .adam