Question

When I do

puts /<title>(.*?)<\/title>/.match(html)

I get

<h2>foobar</h2>

But I want just

foobar

What’s the most elegant method for doing so?

Answer 1

The most elegant way would be to parse HTML with an HTML parser:

require 'nokogiri'

html  = '<title><h2>Pancakes</h2></title>'
doc   = Nokogiri::HTML(html)
title = doc.at('title').text
# title is now 'Pancakes'

If you try to do this with a regular expression, you will probably fail. For example, if you have an <h2> in your <title> what’s to prevent you from having something like this:

<title><strong>Where</strong> is <span>pancakes</span> <em>house?</em></title>

Trying to handle something like that with a single regex is going to be ugly but doc.at('title').text handles that as easily as it handles <title>Pancakes</title> or <title><h2>Pancakes</h2></title>.

Regular expressions are great tools but they shouldn’t be the only tool in your toolbox.