Regex to match value only once in text value

Question

I am dealing with a dirty data source that has some key value pairs I have to extract. for example:

First Name = John Last Name = Smith Home Phone = 555-333-2345 Work Phone = Email = john.doe@email.com Zip From = 11772 Zip To = 11782 First Name = John First Name = John

To extract the First Name, I am using this regular expression:

/First Name = ([a-zA-Z]*)/

How do I prevent multiple matches in the case where the First Name is duplicated as shown above?

Here is a version of this on Rubular.

is "First Name" always at the beginning of the line? If so you can use this (^First Name = [a-zA-Z]*) — tsukimi, Jul 30 '12 at 02:33
Try the answer found here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/519572/return-first-match-of-ruby-regex — Jason Antic, Jul 30 '12 at 03:01

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 30 '12 at 03:05

3

match will only get the first match (you would use scan to get all):

str.match(/First Name = ([a-zA-Z]*)/).captures.first
#=> "John"

(given your string is in str)

answered Jul 30 '12 at 03:05

Andrew Marshall

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 30 '12 at 04:08

0

[] will also give you the first match:

str[/First Name = ([a-zA-Z]*)/, 1]

The 1 means the first capture group

answered Jul 30 '12 at 04:08

pguardiario

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 30 '12 at 10:24

0

/^First Name = ([a-zA-Z]*)/

this will work too. just add ^ to indicate start of line

answered Jul 30 '12 at 10:24

az7ar

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Regex to match value only once in text value

3 Answers3