Question

I have the following string:

nothing to match
<-
this rocks should match as should this still and this rocks and still
->
should not match still or rocks
<- no matches here ->

And i want to find all matches of ‘rocks’ and ‘still’, but only when they are within <- ->

The purpose is to markup glossary words but be able to only mark them up in areas of text that are defined by the editor.

I currently have:

<-.*?(rocks|still).*?->

This unfortunately only matches the first ‘rocks’ and ignores all subsequent instances and all the ‘still’s

I have this in a Rubular

The usage of this will be somthing like

 Regexp.new( '<-.*?(' + self.all.map{ |gt| gt.name }.join("|") + ').*?->', Regexp::IGNORECASE, Regexp::MULTILINE )

Thanks in advance for any help

Answer 1

There may be a way to do this with a single regex, but it will probably be simpler to just do it in two steps. First match all of the markups, and then search the markups for the glossary words:

text = <<END
nothing to match
<-
this rocks should match as should this still and this rocks and still
->
should not match still or rocks
<- no matches here ->
END

text.scan(/<-.*?->/m).each do |match| 
    print match.scan(/rocks|still/), "\n"
end

Also, you should probably note that regex is only a good solution here if there is never any nested markup (<-...<-...->...->) and no escaped <- or -> whether it is inside or outside of a markup.