On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 8:01 PM, Raj pal [email protected] wrote:
Hi Robert,
Can you explain me why this 1 removes the Bracket? I refered the
document but it’s not clear enough to understand. why it removes both
opening and closing bracket here?
From the docs at:
“If a Regexp is supplied, the matching portion of the string is
returned. If a capture follows the regular expression, which may be a
capture group index or name, follows the regular expression that
component of the MatchData is returned instead.”
When you surround some part of the regex in parens, that’s a capturing
group, and by passing the second argument as a 1, you are telling that
you are interested in the first captured group. You can also have
named groups, instead of by index:
a[/[(?[^]]*)]/, :word]
Hope this helps,
Jesus.