Question

I have a string:

s = "<aaa>bbb</ccc>"

I want to get aaa and bbb in ruby block for sub method.
If I call:

s.sub(/<([a-z]+)>([\s\S]+)<\/[a-z]+>/,"first=\\1 second=\\2")

everything works as I expect, so the output is “first=aaa second=bbb”.
Then I call the same regexp with ruby-block, but it returns only the whole string but not \\1 and \\2 parts:

s.sub(/<([a-z]+)>([\s\S]+)<\/[a-z]+>/) { |x,y| puts x; puts y; }

This case output is

<aaa>bbb</ccc>, nil. 

How can I get sentences in braces like \\1, \\2 in ruby-block for sub method?

Answer 1

The string yielded by sub will always be the full match. To get at the captures, you can use $1 and $2 inside the block.