CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubyregex
Yarin
Yarin

Reputation: 183499

Regex match everything up to first period

Trying to get a lazy regex match of everything up until the first period of a sentence.

e.g. Just want to get "jack and jill." from this sentence:
"jack and jill. went up the hill. to fetch a pail."

/.+\./ matches the whole sentence (example)
/(.+?\.)/ matches each instance (example)

Is there a way to just match the first instance?

Upvotes: 11

Views: 37738

Answers (3)

Matthew Brock Carey
Matthew Brock Carey

Reputation: 586

/^([^.]+)/

Let's break it down,

  • ^ is the newline anchor

  • [^.] this matches any character that's not a period

  • \+ to take until a period

And the expression is encapsulated with () to capture it.

Upvotes: 32

Cary Swoveland
Cary Swoveland

Reputation: 110675

I would be inclined to use a regex, but there are other options.

str = "jack and jill. went up the hill. supposedly to fetch a pail of water."
str[0..i] if i = str.index('.')
  #=> "jack and jill."

str = "three blind mice"
str[0..i] if i = str.index('.')
  #=> nil

Upvotes: 1

Casimir et Hippolyte
Casimir et Hippolyte

Reputation: 89547

If you only want the first occurrence, do not choose the scan method that returns all results in the string. You can use the match method that returns a MatchData instance, but you can also simply write:

> "jack and jill. went up the hill. to fetch a pail."[/.+?\./]
 => "jack and jill."

Upvotes: 2

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