Regular expression matching date, author and agency in string

Rails
#1

Hello All,

I wanted regular expression for the following patterns like

Nauzer Bharucha, TNN 10 September 2009, 12:01am IST

IANS 3 September 2009, 02:57pm IST

regular expression should return
date in first group
author in second group
and agency in third group

for below pattern it should return
Nauzer Bharucha, TNN 10 September 2009, 12:01am IST

$1 = 10 September 2009
$2 = Nauzer Bharucha
$3 = TNN

In second case author is nil

Any ideas ?

Sandip

#2

Not to sound rude, but you should do it yourself. It will help you in
your
programming career. Moreover, it’s not a rails related issue.

You can use Internet search for learning more about regex. This is first
result I got on Google:
http://www.regular-expressions.info/reference.html

Thanks,
Abhinav

PS: Please don’t outsource your work to this mailing list, and if you
do,
please do tell us what all you tried.

अभिनव
http://twitter.com/abhinav

#3

Hi –

On Fri, 11 Sep 2009, Sandip R. wrote:

author in second group

Any ideas ?

I’m in a “teaching to fish” mood :slight_smile:

If you’re not yet thinking in regex terms, you need to dissect and
describe your pattern, and then translate it into a regular
expression. Here’s a description, as I understand it.

 zero or one of
   (one or more non-comma characters)
   a comma
   one or more spaces
 (three uppercase letters)
 one or more spaces
 (one or more non-comma characters)

etc.

Also, note that you can’t choose which capture will be $1, $2, etc.
They are assigned strictly in the order in which the left parentheses
appear, left to right (unless you use (?:slight_smile: to suppress inclusion of a
particular group).

David

–
David A. Black / Ruby Power and Light, LLC / http://www.rubypal.com
Ruby/Rails training, mentoring, consulting, code-review
Latest book: The Well-Grounded Rubyist (http://www.manning.com/black2)