Question

This is Ruby 1.8.7 but should be same as for 1.9.x

I am trying to split a string for example:

a = "foo.bar.size.split('.').last"
# trying to split into ["foo", "bar","split('.')","last"]

Basically splitting it in commands it represents, I am trying to do it with Regexp but not sure how, idea was to use regexp

a.split(/[a-z\(\)](\.)[a-z\(\)]/)

Here trying to use group (\.) to split it with but this seems not to be good approach.

Answer 1

I think this would do it:

a.split(/\.(?=[\w])/)

I don’t know how much you know about regex, but the (?=[\w]) is a lookahead that says “only match the dot if the next character is a letter kind of character”. A lookahead won’t actually grab the text it matches. It just “looks”. So the result is exactly what you’re looking for:

> a.split(/\.(?=[\w])/)
 => ["foo", "bar", "size", "split('.')", "last"]