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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T21:59:11+00:00

If I want all the lines with the text ‘ruby’ but not ‘myruby’ then

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If I want all the lines with the text ‘ruby’ but not ‘myruby’ then this is what I would do.

:g/\<ruby\>/

My question is what is the meaning of lesser than and greater than symbol here? The only regular expression I have used is while programming in ruby.

Similarly if I want to find three consecutive blank lines then this is what I would do 

/^\n\{3}

My question is why I am escaping the first curly brace ( opening curly brace ) but not escaping the second curly brace ( closing curly brace )?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    the \< and \> mean word boundaries. In Perl, grep and less (to name 3 OTOH) you use \b for this, so I imagine it’s the same in Ruby.

    Regarding your 2nd question, the escape is needed for the whole expression {3}. You’re not escaping each curly brace, but rather the whole thing together.

    See this question for more.

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