Question

After three hours I’m going to stop banging my head on the wall and ask for help. This ought to be an easy regex, but I just can’t quite get my mind around it today.

Given a short string and a few different patterns, I need to extract all the matching patterns from the string, where each pattern is a “whole word”.

The patterns are: "YES", "NO", "MAYBE", any sequence of asterisks ['*', '**', '***', '...'], any number from 0 to 999, with the case of the text being case-insensitive.

So if s = 'foo yes and no doo 5 boo **** bar far 13 not but no' the result would be ["yes", "no", "5", "****", "13", "no"]

Answer 1

s = 'foo yes and no doo 5 boo * *** bar far 13 not but no YESTERDAY'
ms = s.scan(/(?:\b(?:yes|no|\d{1,3})\b|\*+)/i)
ms # => ["yes", "no", "5", "*", "***", "13", "no"]