Question

Using Ruby 1.8.7

I need to grab everything up to a certain word – and I would like to match against words in an array. Example:

match_words = ['title','author','pages']
item = "Title: Jurassic Park\n"
item += "Author: Michael Crichton\n"

if item =~ /title: (.*)#{match any word in match_words array}/i
  #do something here
end

So, this would ideally return “Jurassic Park\n”. I am currently matching on newlines but have found that the data I will be matching against might have newlines in strange places, like the middle of the sentence. So, I think matching to the next match_word would be a good idea.

Is this possible, or maybe can be done another way?

Answer 1

Try this on for size

item.scan(/(title|author|pages):\s*?(.+)/i)

What this says is find all the results that start (case-insensitive) with either title, author or pages, are then followed by a colon and option white space and then characters. Capture the label and then the characters following the whitespace. The scan method will match as many times as it can.