Question

I need a regular expression that matches sentences that end with one of three words.

For example assume the three words are: miles and yards.

My_String = One October 5, 2012 a race was run in Washington, D.C. There were 400 runners in the race. The distance of the race was ten miles.

Given the string I would like to match = The distance of the race was ten miles.

I have tried the following: regex = /.\s.*[miles.|yards.]/

and match = match.regex(My_String)
`

But this is matching all the sentence before the sentence I’m interested as well as the sentence I’m interested in.

Update:

Kirill Polishchuk has come up with a solution that seems to get me pretty close (see below). Unfortunately, when I put this into the Rubular expression tester it simply highlights the target sentence but does not return it as a match.

I’m starting to think that Kirill’s expression is actually working but it may not be supported in the Rubular engine I’m using to test it.

Final Update:

The following expression successfully matched the target sentence:

([^.]*(?:miles|yards)\.)

Thanks for everyone’s help.

Answer 1

Try this:

[^.]*(?:miles|yards)\.

In this regex I assume that sentence ends with . symbol. It is really complicated to determine bounds of sentence using regex.