Question

Apparently I still don’t understand exactly how it works …

Here is my problem: I’m trying to match numbers in strings such as:

     910     -6.258000  6.290

That string should gives me an array like this:

[910, -6.2580000, 6.290]

while the string

  blabla9999 some more text 1.1

should not be matched.

The regex I’m trying to use is

/([-]?\d+[.]?\d+)/

but it doesn’t do exactly that. Could someone help me ?

It would be great if the answer could clarify the use of the parenthesis in the matching.

Answer 1

Here’s a pattern that works:

/^[^\d]+?\d+[^\d]+?\d+[\.]?\d+$/

Note that [^\d]+ means at least one non digit character.

On second thought, here’s a more generic solution that doesn’t need to deal with regular expressions:

str.gsub(/[^\d.-]+/, " ").split.collect{|d| d.to_f}

Example:

str = "blabla9999 some more text -1.1"

Parsed:

[9999.0, -1.1]