Regular expression in Ruby

Question

Hi,

Could anybody help me make a proper regular expression from a bunch of text in Ruby. I tried a lot but I don't know how to handle variable length titles.

The string will be of format <sometext>title:"<actual_title>"<sometext>. I want to extract actual_title from this string.

I tried /title:"."/ but it doesnt find any matches as it expects a closing quotation after one variable from opening quotation. I couldn't figure how to make it check for variable length of string. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

/title:"([^"]*)"/

The parentheses create a capturing group. Inside is first a character class. The ^ means it's negated, so it matches any character that's not a ". The * means 0 or more. You can change it to one or more by using + instead of *.

Answer 2

. matches any single character. Putting + after a character will match one or more of those characters. So .+ will match one or more characters of any sort. Also, you should put a question mark after it so that it matches the first closing-quotation mark it comes across. So:

/title:"(.+?)"/

The parentheses are necessary if you want to extract the title text that it matched out of there.

Answer 3

If it helps, you may like rubular.com, a beautiful online regex tester (and a ruby one).