On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 04:27:30PM -0400, David Kavanagh wrote: > I understand regular expressions. been doing them a long time in > various languages. But, how are the fields determined from this regex? > > David >
You have to put everything you want to capture in parentheses, so
/^Hello (.*)$/.match('Hello World').captures == ['World']
However if you want to just define a block and you don't
want to capture it you can use (?: and ) instead of ( and ).
I used that in the regex like in
(?:\s*=\s*(.*?))?
This means there is an optional equal sign with stuff after it as
indicated by the quotation mark after the block marked with the
outer parentheses (?: and ). But I dont want to capture the whole
block so I just capture what is after the equal sign
(the inner parentheses).
Does this answers your question?
-Stefan
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