Using regular expressions to replace...

[selfmindead]

I would greatly appreciate it if somoene could help me out with something... I'm having trouble writing a loop in RoR that continues replacing based on a regular expression until there are no more matches left for the regular expression.

The part that confuses me the most is how to make a while loop continue until a regular expression is not returning values anymore... can anyone help me out with this?

[sweatje]

Doesn't gsub handle this?

 $ irb
>> str = "this is a target string with
some targets in it"
=> "this is a target string with\nsome targets in it"
>> str.gsub(/target/, 'bullseye')
=> "this is a bullseye string with\nsome bullseyes in it"

[Radley]

You can use a string for the search argument if a regex is not necessary.

[ezmobius1]

while string =~ /regex/
   string.gsub!(/regex/, 'replacement text')
end

But that is almost pointless since gsub does a global substitution on the whole string and will replace multiple items matching the regex. So you could do this without the while loop pretty much. But you asked for the while loop so this is how you would do it.

[selfmindead]

 
 while string =~ /regex/
    string.gsub!(/regex/, 'replacement text')
 end

But that is almost pointless since gsub does a global substitution on the whole string and will replace multiple items matching the regex. So you could do this without the while loop pretty much. But you asked for the while loop so this is how you would do it.

the point of the while loop is because "replacement text" will change depending on the return value of the regexp... this is my regexp: /\<\%\=(.*?)\%\>/... the code in the middle of the "<%=" and the "%>" is what is used to grab the replacement text from the database....

So, hopfully that explains why I needed a while loop. Maybe you guys know some alternatives?

[xmitchx]

You could probably use the while loop and directly modify the "string" variable and so it'd slowly run out of matches:

while string =~ /regex/
 	string = 'blablabla' 
 end

But of course you wouldnt just assign a string but I think you get the idea.

[stereofrog]

the point of the while loop is because "replacement text" will change depending on the return value of the regexp... this is my regexp: /\<\%\=(.*?)\%\>/... the code in the middle of the "<%=" and the "%>" is what is used to grab the replacement text from the database....

So, hopfully that explains why I needed a while loop. Maybe you guys know some alternatives?

You can try an iterator instead of loop

puts "<foo> xxx <bar> yyy".gsub(/<(.*?)>/) {
	"contents of #$1"
}

[selfmindead]

I know enough to get it done now, thanks alot everyone!

I'll be sure to post the finished code when I'm done, for archiving purposes :P

[ezmobius1]

the point of the while loop is because "replacement text" will change depending on the return value of the regexp... this is my regexp: /\<\%\=(.*?)\%\>/... the code in the middle of the "<%=" and the "%>" is what is used to grab the replacement text from the database....

So, hopfully that explains why I needed a while loop. Maybe you guys know some alternatives?

That regex looks suspiciously like erb tag syntax. Is there any reason you are parsing that by hand instead of using the built in erb tag parser in the stdlib? It could save you some hassle.


-Ezra