Question

Is there anyway to scan only if there is nothing before what I am scanning for.

For example I have a post and I am scanning for a forward slash and what follows it but I do not want to scan for a forward slash if it is not the beginning character.

I want to scan for /this but I do not want to scan for this/this or http://this.com.

The regular expression I am currently using is..

/\/(\w+)/

I am using this with gsub to link each /forwardslash.

Answer 1

I think what you are asking for is to only match words that begin with ‘/’, not strings or lines beginning with ‘/’. If that is true, I believe the following regex will work: %r{(?:^|\s+)/(\w+)}:

For example:

"/foo /this this/that http://this".scan %r{(?:^|\s+)/(\w+)}  # => [["foo"], ["this"]]