Programming Ruby 3.3

Regular Expression Syntax

We said earlier that, within a pattern, all characters match themselves except for . | ( ) [ ] { } + \ ^ $ * and ?. Those characters all have special meanings in regular expression patterns. First, always remember that you need to escape any of these characters with a backslash if you want them to be treated as regular characters to match:

show_regexp('yes | no', /\|/)       # => yes ->|<- no
show_regexp('yes (no)', /\(no\)/)   # => yes ->(no)<-
show_regexp('are you sure?', /e\?/) # => are you sur->e?<-

Now let’s see what some of these characters mean if you use them without escaping them.

Anchors

By default, a regular expression will try to find the first match for the pattern in a string. Match /iss/ ...