Question

I grabbed some information from an RSS feed in XML. I need some help trying to get the values I need.

I’m hoping the regex can be fairly loose in case the tabs, newlines or spaces change, but, I’m pretty horrible at regex so I need some help.

Here’s the text I have:

\n\t\t\t\t\tMIDDAY DRAW DATE: \t\t\tFriday 10/26/12 \n\t\t\t\t\tMIDDAY WINNING NUMBER:\t\t\t6-9-6-0\n\t\t\t\t\tMIDDAY PAYOUT: \t$4,000.\n\t\t\t\t\tNEXT MIDDAY DRAW DATE: \tSaturday 10/27/12\n\t\t\t\t

Also, these \n\t, characters are all just plaintext.

I’d like to extract each of the values into separate variables, so:

MIDDAY DRAW DATE
MIDDAY WINNING NUMBER
MIDDAY PAYOUT
NEXT MIDDAY DRAW DATE

If anyone could help, that would be great.

Answer 1

string.scan(/^\s*(.*?):\s*(.*?)\s*$/)

will give you:

[
  ["MIDDAY DRAW DATE", "Friday 10/26/12"],
  ["MIDDAY WINNING NUMBER", "6-9-6-0"],
  ["MIDDAY PAYOUT", "$4,000."],
  ["NEXT MIDDAY DRAW DATE", "Saturday 10/27/12"]
]

If you just want the values without the keys, then

string.scan(/:\s*(.*?)\s*$/)

will give you:

[
  ["Friday 10/26/12"],
  ["6-9-6-0"],
  ["$4,000."],
  ["Saturday 10/27/12"]
]