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Regular Expressions (Regex) in Ruby

Regular expressions (regex) in Ruby

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Muthamil0593
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© © All Rights Reserved
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18 views

Regular Expressions (Regex) in Ruby

Regular expressions (regex) in Ruby

Uploaded by

Muthamil0593
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Regular expressions (regex) in Ruby are patterns used to match, search, and

manipulate strings. Ruby provides extensive support for regular expressions, and
they are represented as /pattern/ in Ruby.

In Ruby, regular expressions are created between slashes (/) or by using %r{},
especially if the pattern contains slashes:
pattern = /ruby/
pattern_alt = %r{ruby}

=~ (Match Operator)
The =~ operator checks if a pattern matches a string. It returns the position of
the first match or nil if there’s no match.
puts "I love Ruby!" =~ /Ruby/ # Outputs: 7
puts "Hello" =~ /Ruby/ # Outputs: nil

.match Method
The .match method returns a MatchData object if the pattern matches, which includes
details about the match.
result = /Ruby/.match("I love Ruby!")
puts result[0] # Outputs: Ruby

.scan Method
The .scan method finds all occurrences of the pattern in the string and returns
them as an array.
puts "I love Ruby and Ruby on Rails!".scan(/Ruby/)
# Outputs: ["Ruby", "Ruby"]

.sub and .gsub Methods


.sub replaces the first occurrence of the pattern with a given replacement string.
.gsub replaces all occurrences of the pattern.
puts "I love Ruby".sub(/Ruby/, "Python") # Outputs: I love Python
puts "Ruby is great. Ruby is fun.".gsub(/Ruby/, "Python")
# Outputs: Python is great. Python is fun.

^ and $ : ^ matches the start and $ matches the end of a line


"Ruby".match(/^R/) # Matches only if the string starts with 'R'

* : Matches 0 or more occurrences of the preceding element


"Ruby!".match(/u*/)

+ : Matches 1 or more occurrences of the preceding element


"Ruby".match(/u+/) # Matches

? : Matches 0 or 1 occurrence of the preceding element


"Ruby".match(/u?/) # Matches

\d : Matches any digit (0-9).


"123".match(/\d+/) # Matches "123"

\w : Matches any word character (alphanumeric and underscore).


"ruby_123".match(/\w+/) # Matches "ruby_123"

\s : Matches any whitespace character (space, tab, newline)


" ".match(/\s/) # Matches

You can use parentheses () to create groups in a regex pattern and capture parts of
the string:
pattern = /(\w+)@(\w+)\.(\w+)/
result = pattern.match("[email protected]")

Examples:
Example 1: Basic Pattern Matching
# Check if a string contains a pattern
text = "hello world"
if text =~ /world/
puts "Found 'world' in the text"
else
puts "'world' not found in the text"
end

Example 2: Extracting Numbers from a String


# Extract all numbers from a string
text = "I have 2 apples and 3 bananas."

numbers = text.scan(/\d+/)
puts "Extracted numbers: #{numbers}" # Output: ["2", "3"]

Example 3: Finding All Words in a String


# Find all words in a string
text = "Ruby is a beautiful language!"
words = text.scan(/\b\w+\b/)
puts "Words: #{words}" # Output: ["Ruby", "is", "a", "beautiful", "language"]

Example 4: Matching Phone Numbers


# Match a simple phone number format (e.g., 123-456-7890)
phone = "123-456-7890"
if phone =~ /^\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}$/
puts "Valid phone number format"
else
puts "Invalid phone number format"
end

Example 5:Removing Vowels from a String


# Remove all vowels from a string
text = "Hello, Ruby!"
no_vowels = text.gsub(/[aeiouAEIOU]/, "")
puts no_vowels # Output: "Hll, Rby!"

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