Question

I need the MatchData for each occurrence of a regular expression in a string. This is different than the scan method suggested in Match All Occurrences of a Regex, since that only gives me an array of strings (I need the full MatchData, to get begin and end information, etc).

input = "abc12def34ghijklmno567pqrs"
numbers = /\d+/

numbers.match input # #<MatchData "12"> (only the first match)
input.scan numbers  # ["12", "34", "567"] (all matches, but only the strings)

I suspect there is some method that I’ve overlooked. Suggestions?

Answer 1

You want

"abc12def34ghijklmno567pqrs".to_enum(:scan, /\d+/).map { Regexp.last_match }

which gives you

[#<MatchData "12">, #<MatchData "34">, #<MatchData "567">] 

The “trick” is, as you see, to build an enumerator in order to get each last_match.