Thanks for all of the tips about this question.
I actually shortened the suggestion below to:
“a.b. c! d?? e.”.scan(/.*?[.!?]+/)
This returns all of the sentences as elements of the array and includes
the punctuation. It works even if there are no spaces between the
punctuation and the next sentence, and it works if there are 1 or more
‘.’, ‘?’, or ‘!’:
[“a.”, “b.”, " c!“, " d??”, " e."]
Thanks again,
Glenn
----- Original Message ----
From: Robert K. [email protected]
To: ruby-talk ML [email protected]
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 7:43:45 AM
Subject: Re: Question about split method
2008/2/25, Glenn [email protected]:
The three sentences in the above string have very different meanings, but loose those meanings without the punctuation, so I’d like to keep the punctuation. I’d like a method that keeps the split characters, and returns this array:
[“This is a sentence.”, " This is a sentence!“, " This is a sentence?”]
Does such an array exist? If not, would it be possible to modify the split method to produce that result?
I’m running Ruby 1.8.6 on Windows.
Hm, you could do it with lookbehind on 1.9. On 1.8 you only have
lookforward which gives you this:
irb(main):002:0> “a. b.”.split /(?=.\s+)/
=> [“a”, “. b.”]
Not quite what you wanted. 
But here’s an alternative approach which works with 1.8:
irb(main):005:0> “a. b. c! d? e.”.scan /.*?.!?/
=> ["a. ", "b. ", "c! ", "d? ", “e.”]
Kind regards
robert