Hi, I’m new to the list and I hope this is the right place to ask the
question, but I recently started learning ruby and I was writing a short
little program to test if a word was made up of symbols from the
periodic
table. I figured I’d use ruby’s built-in regex support, so I ended up
writing a regex that looks something like this:
(element1|element2|element3…|elementx)+
Basically it’s just got all 115 or so of the elements in there, and
it’s
testing for one or more, right? Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to work
properly as a (nonsense) word like “presenti” should be periodic
according
to my list of elements, [p][re][se][n][ti]. Now, I can duplicate this
behavior with the regex coach oddly enough. The problem seems to be that
it
parses [p][re][s] instead of [se]. I’m wondering if anyone can explain
this
behavior to me, as I’m new to both regexps and ruby and the only regex
experience I’ve had previous to this is in some theory classes. Thanks.
The
full expression is below.
(He|Li|Be|C|O|Ne|Na|Mg|Al|Si|S|Cl|Ar|Ca|Sc|Ti|Cr|Mn|Fe|Co|Ni|Cu|Zn|Ga|Ge|As|Se|Br|Kr|Rb|Sr|Zr|Nb|Mo|Tc|Ru|Rh|Pd|Ag|Cd|In|Sn|Sb|Te|Xe|Cs|Ba|Hf|Ta|Re|Os|Ir|Pt|Au|Hg|Tl|Pb|Bi|Po|At|Rn|Fr|Ra|Rf|Db|Sg|Bh|Hs|Mt|Uun|Uuu|Uub|Uuq|Uuh|Uuo|Ds|La|Ce|Pr|Nd|Pm|Sm|Eu|Gd|Tb|Dy|Ho|Er|Tm|Yb|Lu|Ac|Th|Pa|Np|Pu|Am|Cm|Bk|Cf|Es|Fm|Md|No|Lr|H|B|N|F|P|V|Y|I|W|Uaal)+