Question

I have a hash with a regex for the key and a block for the value. Something like the following:

{ 'test (.+?)' => { puts $1 } }

Not exactly like that, obviously, since the block is being stored as a Proc, but that’s the idea.

I then have a regex match later on that looks a lot like this

hash.each do |pattern, action|
    if /#{pattern}/i.match(string)
        action.call
    end
end

The idea was to store the block away in the hash to make it a bit easier for me to expand upon in the future, but now the regex capture doesn’t get passed to the block. Is there a way to do this cleanly that would support any number of captures I put in the regex (as in, some regex patterns may have 1 capture, others may have 3)?

Answer 1

What if you pass the match data into your procs?

hash.each do |pattern, action|
  if pattern.match(string)
    action.call($~)
  end
end

Your hash would become:

{ /test (.+?)/i => lambda { |matchdata| puts matchdata[1] } }