Question

I need to find strings with * and / using reg-exes, I am writing in Ruby.The reason for this need to find lots of * and / is that I am building a tokenizer for an language and there are multi-line comments that use the C style of multi-line comments (/* */). I have the single line comments handled already.

Is there a way to use reg-ex without having to use the two foreword slashes to indicate some regular expression because I am finding it impossible to find my mistakes due to the insane amount of escaping. Or can someone give me advise on how to handle the escaping in a sane matter? I already tried writing the sequence first then escaping it.

Thank you for your time and advise.

Answer 1

One trick that might help is the %r literal:

%r{http://www\.google\.com}

I like to use pipes myself, when they’re not in the regex.

%r|http://www\.google\.com|

You can also create new instances of Regexp via Regexp.new and pass a string.

Finally, you might also look at Regexp.quote:

Escapes any characters that would have special meaning in a regular expression. Returns a new escaped string, or self if no characters are escaped. For any string, Regexp.new(Regexp.escape(str))=~str will be true.