Question

I’m currently working on a project in Ruby on Rails (in Eclipse) and my task is to split up a block of data into relevant parts using Regular Expressions.

I’ve decided to break up the data based on 3 parameters:

1. The line must start with a capital letter (RegEx equivalent – /^[A-Z]/)
2. It must end with a : (RegEx equivalent – /$":"/)

I would appreciate any help….The code I’m using in my controller is:

@f = File.open("report.rtf")  
@fread = @f.read  
@chunk = @fread.split(/\n/)

where @chunk is the array that will be created by the split and @fread is the data that is being split up (by new lines).

Any help will be appreciated, thanks a lot!

I cannot release the exact data but it goes basically by this (this is medically related)

Exam 1: CBW 8080

RESULT:

This report is dictated with specific measurement.
Please see the original report.

COMPARISON: 1/30/2012, 3/8/12, 4/9/12

RECIST 1.1:
BLAH BLAH BLAH

The ideal output would be an array that says:

["Exam 1:", "CBW 8080", "RESULT", "This report is dictated with specific measurement. Please see the original report.", "COMPARISON:", "1/30/2012, 3/8/12, 4/9/12", "RECIST 1.1:", "BLAH BLAH BLAH"]

PS I’m just using \n as a placeholder until I get it working

Answer 1

Given the clarified question, here’s a new solution.

UPDATED

“Slurp” the entire block of data (including the newline characters and all) into a single string, first.

str = IO.read("report.rtf")

Then use this regex:

captures = str.scan(/(?<=^|[\r\n])([A-Z][^:]*):([^\r\n]*(?:[\r\n]+(?![A-Z].*:).*)*)/)

See a live example here: http://rubular.com/r/8w3X6WGq4l.

The answer, explained:

    (?<=                Lookbehind assertion.
        ^                   Start at the beginning of the string,
        |                   or,
        [\r\n]              a new line.
    )
    (                   Capture group 1, the "key".
        [A-Z][^:]*          Capital letter followed as many non-colon
                            characters as possible.
    )
    :                   The colon character.

    (                   Capture group 2, the "value".
        [^\r\n]*            All characters (i.e. non-newline characters) on the
                            same line belongs to the "value," so take them all.

        (?:             Non-capture group.

            [\r\n]+         Having already taken everything up to a newline
                            character, take the newline character(s) now.

            (?!             Negative lookahead assertion.
                [^A-Z].*:       If this next line contains a capital letter,
                                followed by a string of anything then a colon,
                                then it is a new key/value pair, so we do not
                                want to match this case.
            )
            .*              Providing this isn't the case though, take the line!

        )*              And keep taking lines as long as we don't find a
                        key/value pair.
    )