Making one reg ex out of two

Ruby
1

I have a string:

course_info =
“10.10.09Maths”

I want to use a reg ex to extract the title from the string, in this
case “Maths”

So far I came up with:

course_info.gsub!(/^(.)/, “”)
course_info.gsub!(/</title>(.)$/, “”).chomp!
p course_info

-> “Maths”

Is it possible amalgamate these two regular expressions into one or to
improve this in any way?
Am grateful for any help.

2

On Oct 9, 6:46 am, Jim B. [email protected] wrote:

course_info =
“10.10.09Maths”

I want to use a reg ex to extract the title from the string, in this
case “Maths”

Slim2:~ phrogz$ irb
irb(main):001:0> course_info =
“10.10.09Maths”
=> “10.10.09Maths”

irb(main):002:0> course_info[ /([^<]+)/, 1 ]
=> “Maths”

irb(main):003:0> %r{(.+?)}.match(course_info).to_a
=> [“Maths”, “Maths”]

3

Thanks very much for that.
It’ll take me a while to figure out what you’ve done, but that seems to
work perfectly!

Gavin K. wrote:

Slim2:~ phrogz$ irb
irb(main):001:0> course_info =
“10.10.09Maths”
=> “10.10.09Maths”

irb(main):002:0> course_info[ /([^<]+)/, 1 ]
=> “Maths”

irb(main):003:0> %r{(.+?)}.match(course_info).to_a
=> [“Maths”, “Maths”]

4

Hi,

Am Freitag, 09. Okt 2009, 22:27:01 +0900 schrieb Jim B.:

=> [“Maths”, “Maths”]

Thanks very much for that.
It’ll take me a while to figure out what you’ve done, but that seems to
work perfectly!

Shorter:

course_info =~ %r{(.+?)}
$1 == “Maths”

Bertram

5

This looks like an XML string. Did course_info come from an XML
document? An XML parser like Hpricot or Nokogiri would be an
improvement.

That’s a good idea. Thanks, I’ll look into that.

6

Hi! I suggest the following:

text=“10.10.09Maths”

text.scan(/([^<]+)/) do
puts “#{$1}”
end

7

On Oct 9, 8:46 am, Jim B. [email protected] wrote:

course_info.gsub!(/^(.)/, “”)
course_info.gsub!(/</title>(.)$/, “”).chomp!
p course_info

→ “Maths”

Is it possible amalgamate these two regular expressions into one or to
improve this in any way?

This looks like an XML string. Did course_info come from an XML
document? An XML parser like Hpricot or Nokogiri would be an
improvement.

8

This looks like an XML string. Did course_info come from an XML
document? An XML parser like Hpricot or Nokogiri would be an
improvement.

Quick update:
Just installed and followed a quick tutorial on Hpricot.
While effectively accomplishing the same task, this parser makes the
code much easier to read. I can now write:

doc = Hpricot.parse(File.read(“courses.xml”))
(doc/:course).each do |course|
if (course/:date).inner_html.match “#{date}”
groups_that_had_lessons_this_month << (course/:title).inner_html
end
end

as opposed to this (or worse):

File.open(“courses.txt”, ‘r’) do |datei|
datei.readlines.select do |line|
if line.match “#{date}”
groups_that_had_lessons_this_month << line[ /([^<]+)/, 1 ]
end
end
end

Thanks for the recommendation, and thanks everyone else for the answers
too.