irb(main):001:0> str = 'My dog "ate" my "math homework" and "my cat"'
=> "My dog \"ate\" my \"math homework\" and \"my cat\""
irb(main):002:0> str.scan( /"[^"]+"|\w+/ ).map{ |w| w.gsub '"', '' }
=> ["My", "dog", "ate", "my", "math homework", "and", "my cat"]
Not a very robust solution. Won't handle a \" in the middle of some
quotes, or an incorrectly unpaired quote.
···
On Jan 30, 12:28 pm, Cheri Ruska <liquid_ra...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Thank you for your help. Where is a good resource to read up on what
this code means? %r/["'][^"']+["']|\w+/
The topic is called 'regular expressions'. That regular expression says
to find a matching substring where:
1) The first character is either a single or double quote: ['"]
Brackets allow you to specify a group of characters, e.g. [a-z]. If the
first character in a matching substring is any of the characters in the
specified group, then there is a match.
2) Followed by a character that is not(^) one of the characters in the
specified group: [^'"]
If the first character between brackets is ^, it means look for any
character not specified between the brackets.
3) The + after the brackets says to look for "one or more" of the
preceding matching character, i.e. not a single or double quote.
4) Followed by a single or double quote: ["']
5) The pipe(|) means OR. So a substring will also match if the symbols
following the pipe match.
6) \w means any 'word character', which is short hand for: [a-zA-Z0-9]
Once again the + sign following the \w means to match the \w one or more
times.
The result is that the regex matches any phrase surrounded by single or
double quotes OR any series of characters [a-zA-z0-9]. Note that a
space will not match \w so when a space is encountered, the match ends.