Question

I’m trying to write a word counter for LyX files.

Life is almost very simple as most lines that need to be ignored begin with a \ (I’m prepared to make the assumption that no textual lines begin with backslashes) – however there are some lines that look like real text that aren’t, but they are enclosed by \begin_inset and \end_inset:

I'm genuine text.

\begin_inset something
I'm not real text
Perhaps there will be more than one line! Or none at all! Who knows.
\end_inset

/begin_layout
I also need to be counted, and thus not removed
/end_layout

Is there a quick way in ruby to strip the (smallest amount of) text between two markers? I’m imagining Regular Expressions are the way forward, but I can’t figure out what they’d have to be.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Is there a quick way in ruby to strip the (smallest amount of) text between two markers?

str = "lala BEGIN_MARKER \nlu\nlu\n END_MARKER foo BEGIN_MARKER bar END_MARKER baz"
str.gsub(/BEGIN_MARKER.*?END_MARKER/m, "")
#=> "lala  foo  baz"