Question

I have a big text and I’d like to remove everything before a certain string.

The problem is, there are several occurrences of that string in the text, and I want to decide which one is correct by later analyzing the found piece of text.
I can’t include that analysis in a regular expression because of its complexity:

text = <<HERE
big big text
goes here
HERE

pos = -1

a = text.scan(/some regexp/im)
a.each do |m|
  s = m[0]

  # analysis of found string
  ...


  if ( s is good ) # is the right candidate
    pos = ??? # here I'd like to have a position of the found string in the text.

  end

end

result_text = text[pos..-1]

Answer 1

$~.offset(n) will give the position of the n-th part of a match.