Question

Why one regex behaves differently for scan and match methods?

str = "A man, a plan, a canal -- Panama"

/\w+/.match(str).to_s #=> #<MatchData "A"> i.e. just "A"

str.scan(/\w+/)       #=> ["A", "man", "a", "plan", "a", "canal", "Panama"]

The methods should bring the same result, shouldn’t they?

Answer 1

match will only returns the first match, because that’s what it does, while scan will return all matches. The regexes used do actually work exactly the same. See this.