Question

I’ve carefully cut and pasted from this Rubular window http://rubular.com/r/YH8Qj2EY9j to my code, yet I get different results. The Rubular match capture is what I want. Yet

desc_pattern = /^<DD>(.*\n?.*)\n/
if desc =~ desc_pattern
    puts description = $1 
end

only gets me the first line, i.e.

<DD>@mathpunk Griefing (i.e. trolling) as Play: http://t.co/LwOH1Vb<br />

I don’t think it’s my test data, but that’s possible. What am I missing?

(ruby 1.9 on Ubuntu 10.10(

Answer 1

Paste your test data into an editor that is able to display control characters and verify your line break characters. Normally it should be only \n on a Linux system as in your regex. (I had unusual linebreaks a few weeks ago and don’t know why.)

The other check you can do is, change your brackets and print your capturing groups. so that you can see which part of your regex matches what.

/^<DD>(.*)\n?(.*)\n/

Another idea to get this to work is, change the .*. Don’t say match any character, say match anything, but \n.

^<DD>([^\n]*\n?[^\n]*)\n