Question

I got a string in Ruby like this:

str = "enum('cpu','hdd','storage','nic','display','optical','floppy','other')"

Now i like to return just a array with only the words (not quotes, thats between the round braces (…). The regex below works, buts includes ‘enum’ which i don’t need.

str.scan(/\w+/) 

expected result should be:

{"OPTICAL"=>"optical", "DISPLAY"=>"display", "OTHER"=>"other", "FLOPPY"=>"floppy", "STORAGE"=>"storage", "NIC"=>"nic", "HDD"=>"hdd", "CPU"=>"cpu"}

thanks!

Answer 1

I’d suggest using negative lookahead to eliminate words followed by (:

str.scan(/\w+(?!\w|\()/)

Edit: regex updated, now it also excludes \w, so it won’t match word prefixes.