CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubyregex
Pol0nium
Pol0nium

Reputation: 1376

Ruby regex on a path

I have a string like that :

//some.path/again/and/again/foo/bar/ABC_blahblah.xls

I want to retreive ABC which is always between a / and a _

I tried so far : 

path.scan(/\/(.*)_/).last.first

but I get //some.path/again/and/again/foo/bar/ABC

I see that ruby matches the first /. How can I get what is between the last \ and the _?

Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1075

Answers (3)

Bala
Bala

Reputation: 11234

path = "//some.path/again/and/again/foo/bar/ABC_blahblah.xls"
path.scan(/(?:[^\/])*(?=_)/).reject(&:empty?)

Upvotes: 0

the Tin Man
the Tin Man

Reputation: 160551

Don't use a full regex to break down a file path. Instead, rely on some pre-written code. The reason is, if you move your code to a different OS, such as Windows, it's possible you'll get file paths using different path separators. Ruby's IO and File classes are aware of the differences and will automatically adjust for you.

Compare your pure regular expression solution to something like these:

path = '//some.path/again/and/again/foo/bar/ABC_blahblah.xls'

File.basename(path) # => "ABC_blahblah.xls"

File.basename(path)[/^([^_]+)/, 1]      # => "ABC"
File.basename(path)[/^(.+)_/, 1]        # => "ABC"
File.basename(path).split('_', 2).first # => "ABC"

File's basename returns the name of the file when given a path to the file.

Upvotes: 2

yonosoytu
yonosoytu

Reputation: 3319

Try using \/([^\/]*)_ it will avoid having any forward slash in the captured group.

Upvotes: 1

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