Ruby Regular Expressions - Checking the start middle and end of a line?

Question

Hi,

I need to get the "274.20p" out of:

<td nowrap="nowrap" class="dataRegularUlOn" style="text-align: right;">274.20p</td>

I would like to do regular expressions on:

<td    class="dataRegularUlOn"    >

so something like:

/<td(.*?)class="dataRegularUlOn"(.*?)>/

I'm using ruby, on linux.

thks

Answer 1

Why not use something like http://github.com/whymirror/hpricot instead and then you can just use the xpath to the element to retrieve the value.

Answer 2

Are you parsing an html file? I think you should use XPath, really easy to use. For Ruby there is Nokogiri.

Using regexp, I would do like this:

ruby_sub_string = /.*[\d]+\.[\d]{1,2}p(.*)/.match(my_string)
ruby_sub_string[1]

It should do the trick. I can't try it rigth now though.

Answer 3

Why do you want to write your own HTML parser, when there's plenty of perfectly capable HTML parsers already out there?

require 'nokogiri'

doc = Nokogiri::HTML('
    <td nowrap="nowrap" class="dataRegularUlOn" style="text-align: right;">
        274.20p
    </td>')

p doc.search('.dataRegularUlOn').map(&:text)
# => ["272.20p"]

Answer 4

Try this regular expression:

/<td[^>]*class="dataRegularUlOn"[^>]*>([^<]*)<\/td>/