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Ruby Programming
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Grouping

You can use parentheses to group terms within a regular expression. Everything within the group is treated as a single regular expression.

showRE('banana', /an*/) b<<an>>ana
showRE('banana', /(an)*/) <<>>banana
showRE('banana', /(an)+/) b<<anan>>a

a = 'red ball blue sky'
showRE(a, /blue|red/) <<red>> ball blue sky
showRE(a, /(blue|red) \w+/) <<red ball>> blue sky
showRE(a, /(red|blue) \w+/) <<red ball>> blue sky
showRE(a, /red|blue \w+/) <<red>> ball blue sky

showRE(a, /red (ball|angry) sky/) no match
a = 'the red angry sky'
showRE(a, /red (ball|angry) sky/) the <<red angry sky>>

Parentheses are also used to collect the results of pattern matching. Ruby counts opening parentheses, and for each stores the result of the partial match between it and the corresponding closing parenthesis. You can use this partial match both within the remainder of the pattern and in your Ruby program. Within the pattern, the sequence \1 refers to the match of the first group, \2 the second group, and so on. Outside the pattern, the special variables $1, $2, and so on, serve the same purpose.

"12:50am" =~ /(\d\d):(\d\d)(..)/ 0
"Hour is #$1, minute #$2" "Hour is 12, minute 50"
"12:50am" =~ /((\d\d):(\d\d))(..)/ 0
"Time is #$1" "Time is 12:50"
"Hour is #$2, minute #$3" "Hour is 12, minute 50"
"AM/PM is #$4" "AM/PM is am"

The ability to use part of the current match later in that match allows you to look for various forms of repetition.

# match duplicated letter
showRE('He said "Hello"', /(\w)\1/) He said "He<<ll>>o"
# match duplicated substrings
showRE('Mississippi', /(\w+)\1/) M<<ississ>>ippi

You can also use back references to match delimiters.

showRE('He said "Hello"', /(["']).*?\1/) He said <<"Hello">>
showRE("He said 'Hello'", /(["']).*?\1/) He said <<'Hello'>>

Ruby Programming
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