Programming Ruby 3.3

Regular Expression Patterns

Like most things in Ruby, regular expressions are just objects—they are instances of the class Regexp. This means you can assign them to variables, pass them to methods, and so on:

str = "dog and cat"
pattern = /nd/
pattern.match?(str) # => true
str.match?(pattern) # => true

You can also create regular expression objects by calling the Regexp class’s new method or by using the arbitrary delimiter %r{...} syntax. The %r syntax is particularly useful when creating patterns that contain forward slashes:

/mm\/dd/            # => /mm\/dd/
Regexp.new("mm/dd") # => /mm\/dd/
%r{mm/dd}           # => /mm\/dd/

Playing with Regular Expressions

If you’re like us, you’ll sometimes get confused by regular expressions. ...