Question

If I have the following string:

str="hello %%one_boy%%'s something %%four_girl%%'s something more"

how would I edit it to get the following output from printing str:

"hello ONE_BOY's something FOUR_GIRL's something more"

I have been trying to use ‘gsub’ and ‘upcase’ methods but am struggling with the regex to get each word between my ‘%%’ symbols.

Answer 1

ruby-1.9.2-p136 :066 > str.gsub(/%%([^%]+)%%/) {|m| $1.upcase}
 => "hello ONE_BOY's something FOUR_GIRL's something more" 

The [^%]+ says it will match 1 or more characters except %, and the $1is a global variable that stores the back reference to what was matched.