Regular expressions

Ruby duplicates the syntax of Perl regexpes. However it also provides the OO syntax.

Usual syntax	Alternative syntax	OO syntax
/^\s*[a-z]/	%r{^\s*[a-z]/}	Regexp.new('^\s*[a-z]')

Many methods (like grep, gsub) accept both regexp and string.

(a = "The moon light") =~ / / a =~ /t/i a =~ /x/ a =~ "oo"

3 0 nil 5

Object oriented internals:

re = /(\d+):(\d+)/; p re.class md = re.match("Time: 21:15 IST"); p md.class p md[0] # == $& p md[1] # == $1 p md[2] # == $2 p md.pre_match # == $` p md.post_match # == $'

Regexp MatchData "21:15" "21" "15" "Time: " " IST"

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