On 12/15/05, William J. [email protected] wrote:
destword = ["bill ", "bob"][“copy”, "apple pear plum peach ", "peach ", “after”, “bill bob”, “bob”]
dest_word = md.captures.last.split
p src_food, dest_word
}
This does happen to solve my specific example, but…
…that split only works because “you know” what the repeating
pattern is. While it does not explicitly repeat the original regex,
that split does the job only because the repeating pattern does
not include blanks. Don’t look at the specific pattern that I
am repeating, but try to imagine any repeating pattern at
that point in the example. Right now, can we come up with a
solution where I can replace that pattern with anything I want
to repeat, and the solution still works?
Right now what ruby does is it only saves the last copy of
however many things it matched. It does seem to me that it
should save all copies of what it matched – somewhere.
For instance, let’s say that Matchdata included another
method called “repeated”, and that method returns an array.
This array has the same number of elements as captures
does. If the pattern-segment for captures[0] is NOT a repeating
pattern, then repeated[0] returns nil. If captures[1] is tied to a
pattern-segment that does (possibly) repeat, then repeated[1]
returns an array of strings, one element for each time that
pattern-segment was found.
Eg:
/^(copy|duplicate) \s+ (\w+\s+)+ (before|after) \s+ (\w+\s*)+ $/x
used to match against the string:
"copy apple pear plum peach after bill bob’
$~.captures[0] == “copy”
$~.repeated[0] == nil
$~.captures[1] == "peach "
$~.repeated[1] == {"apple ", "pear ", "plum ", "peach "}
$~.captures[2] == “after”
$~.repeated[2] == nil
$~.captures[3] == “bob”
$~.repeated[3] == {"bill ", “bob”}
Note that I wouldn’t even need to add the extra ‘()’ around
‘(\w+\s+)+’ if ruby provided something like this.
Of course, the next question is why not just make captures[1]
be the array of “things” which were repeatedly matched, instead
of only holding the last-instance of that repeated pattern. That
would work fine, IMO, although I guess it might break the scripts
of some people.