Ruby Regex Different from Rubular

Question

I'm trying the same super simple regex on Rubular.com and my VM Linux with Ruby 1.9.2 I dont' know why I'm getting different outputs: VM:

my_str = "Madam Anita"
puts my_str[/\w/]

this Outputs: Madam

on Rubular it outputs: MadamAnita Rubular: http://www.rubular.com/r/qyQipItdes

I would love some help. I stuck here. I will not be able to test my code for the hw1.

fresskoma · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-07T02:00:56.560

4

No, it doesn't really. It matches all characters in "Madam" and "Anita", but not the space. The problem you are having is that my_str[/\w/] only returns a single match for the given regular expression, whereas Rubular highlights all possible matches.

If you need all occurrences, you could do this:

1.9.3p194 :002 > "Madam Anita".scan(/\w+/)
 => ["Madam", "", "Anita", ""]

edited Oct 07 '12 at 02:00

answered Oct 07 '12 at 00:39

fresskoma

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Use `\w+` instead...empty groups are usually not so useful. – nneonneo Oct 07 '12 at 00:44

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 07 '12 at 00:40

3

Actually, \w matches a single character. The result in Rubular contains spaces between adjacent characters to tell you this (though I wish they'd also make the highlighting more obvious...). Compare with the output from matching \w+, which matches two strings (Madam and Anita).

answered Oct 07 '12 at 00:40

nneonneo

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thanks for notice this out. I would like a better highlighting also. – frenesim Oct 07 '12 at 00:52

Ruby Regex Different from Rubular

2 Answers2