Question

I have the following regular expression in Ruby:

\<name\>(.+)\<\/name\>

Within in if statement, like so:

if line =~ /\<name\>(.+)\<\/name\>/

Is there any way to get the value of the group (.+)?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Rather than use regex to parse XML or HTML, use a real parser. I like Nokogiri:

require 'nokogiri'

doc = Nokogiri::XML('<somecontainingtags><name>blah</name></somecontainingtags>')

# find all occurences
doc.search('//name').map {|n| n.inner_text } # => ["blah"]

# find the first occurance
doc.at('//name').inner_text # => "blah"