In Ruby, a regular expression, often referred to as a “regex” or “regexp,” is a powerful tool for pattern matching and text manipulation. It is a sequence of characters that defines a search pattern. Regular expressions are used to search for and manipulate text based on specific criteria, such as finding or replacing strings that match a particular pattern.
To use regular expressions in Ruby, you can create a regular expression object by enclosing the pattern within forward slashes (`/`). For example, the regular expression `/pattern/` will match the word “pattern” in a given text.
Here’s a basic overview of how to use regular expressions in Ruby:
- Matching: You can use the `=~` operator to check if a string matches a regular expression.
```ruby text = "Hello, World!" if text =~ /World/ puts "Found 'World' in the text." end ```
In this example, it will output “Found ‘World’ in the text.”
- Searching: You can use the `.match` method to search for a regular expression within a string and extract matched portions.
```ruby text = "The price is $50." match_data = /($\d+)/.match(text) puts match_data[0] # Outputs "$50" ```
The parentheses in the regular expression create capture groups, allowing you to access matched portions individually.
- Replacing: The `.sub` and `.gsub` methods are used to replace substrings based on a regular expression pattern.
```ruby text = "Apples are red. Bananas are yellow." modified_text = text.gsub(/red/, "green") ```
`modified_text` will contain “Apples are green. Bananas are yellow.”
Regular expressions can be as simple or complex as your needs require. They offer a flexible way to perform tasks such as validation, searching, and text manipulation in Ruby. Learning regular expressions is a valuable skill for any developer who needs to work with text data.
