Question

I have a string that looks something like this:

"my name is: andrew"

I’d like to parse the string, pull out the name from the string, and assign it to a variable. How would I do this with Ruby?

Update:

The string I used as an example was only an example. The strings that I will be working with can change formats, so you can’t rely on the colon being in the actual example. Here are a few examples that I’m working with:

"/nick andrew"     # command: nick, value: "andrew"
"/join developers" # command: join, value: "developers"
"/leave"           # command: leave, value: nil

I’d like to use some sort of regular expression to solve this (since the string can change formats), rather than splitting the string on certain characters or relying on a certain character position number.

Answer 1

This tutorial really helped me understand how to work with regular expressions in Ruby.

One way to use a regular expression to get the string you want is to replace the stuff you don’t want with an empty string.

original_string = "my name is: andrew"
name = original_string.sub(/^my name is: /, '') # => 'andrew'

another_format = "/nick andrew"
name = another_format.sub(/^\/nick /, '') # => 'andrew'

However, that’s just string replacement/substitution. The regex is not capturing anyting.

To capture a string using a regular expression, you can use the Ruby match method:

original_string = "my name is: andrew"
matches = original_string.match /^my name is: (.*)/
name = matches[1] # return the first match