Regular expression in Ruby

Question

http://www.example.com/books?_pop=mheader

What would be the regular expression to match this and any URL that has "books" in the URLs as one of the pattern matches ? This site has a books category and various other sub-categories under that. How do I traverse down to search all the URLs for book ?

require 'anemone'
Pattern = %r[(\/books)*]
Anemone.crawl("http://www.example.com/") do |anemone|
  anemone.on_pages_like(Pattern) do |page|
    puts page.url
  end
end

If you're using `%r[...]` then you won't need to backslashify your slashes. Also note that constants like your pattern should be `ALL_CAPS` and classes should be `MixedCase`. — tadman, Sep 07 '12 at 06:01

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 07 '12 at 11:25

3

http://rubular.com/ is a useful tool to test regex for Ruby.

The regex would be simple, /http:\/\/.+(books)/. It matchs http:// as well to help ensure it is a url. Here is a rubular test against http://www.example.com/reference-books-2300.

edited Sep 07 '12 at 11:25

Aayush

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answered Sep 07 '12 at 05:19

mguymon

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I updated the rubular example to make the regex match that link – mguymon Sep 07 '12 at 05:32

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 07 '12 at 05:23

1

The pattern to match /books in your url should just be "/books"

This is a good site to test your regular expressions http://regexpal.com to ensure you have at least that part of your code right.

answered Sep 07 '12 at 05:23

Wolfsokta

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Regular expression in Ruby

2 Answers2