Question

Everyone.

I think I’m missing something in ruby regex.

It seems that I cannot use %r/match code/s because Ruby has only /m, wich is not allows me to search my match line ignoring new line symbols.

What I need for now:

line 1 : a b c
line 2 : a b
line 3 : c
line 4 : a
line 5 : b c

I need to find here three matches

1. a b c
2. a b (new line) c
3. a ( new line ) b c

This can be done by using /s flag, but /s flag is used for encoding in Ruby, and /m flag just gives me this one match with all text

a b c 
a b ( new line ) c
a ( new line ) b c

when I search expression like this %r/a.*c/m

I will appreciate for any information.

Answer 1

Ruby is using m to enable the dotall mode, see regular-expressions.info. So your expression is exactly doing what you want the s modifier for.

Your problem is a different one, your regex is matching too greedy. So you should change it to

%r/a.*?c/m

so the .*? will only match to the next “c” and not to the last.