Split Ruby regex over multiple lines

ruby regex code-formatting
Chowlett picture Chowlett · Sep 21, 2010 · Viewed 24.7k times · Source

This might not be quite the question you're expecting! I don't want a regex that will match over line-breaks; instead, I want to write a long regex that, for readability, I'd like to split onto multiple lines of code.

Something like:

"bar" =~ /(foo|
           bar)/  # Doesn't work!
# => nil. Would like => 0

Can it be done?

Answer

mthorley picture mthorley · Dec 11, 2013

Using %r with the x option is the prefered way to do this.

See this example from the github ruby style guide

regexp = %r{
  start         # some text
  \s            # white space char
  (group)       # first group
  (?:alt1|alt2) # some alternation
  end
}x

regexp.match? "start groupalt2end"

https://github.com/github/rubocop-github/blob/master/STYLEGUIDE.md#regular-expressions

Related questions

How to match all occurrences of a regex

Is there a quick way to find every match of a regular expression in Ruby? I've looked through the Regex object in the Ruby STL and searched on Google to no avail.

Read More
How can I remove the string "\n" from within a Ruby string?

I have this string: "some text\nandsomemore" I need to remove the "\n" from it. I've tried "some text\nandsomemore".gsub('\n','') but it doesn't work. How do I do it? Thanks for reading.

Read More
Extract a substring from a string in Ruby using a regular expression

How can I extract a substring from within a string in Ruby? Example: String1 = "<name> <substring>" I want to extract substring from String1 (i.e. everything within the last occurrence of < and >).

Read More