Ruby: Visual Quickstart Guide

Performing Matches

Although the brunt of this chapter is on the syntax of regular expressions, and specifically the Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) that Ruby implements, you’ll need to know what operators and methods make use of regular expressions. To start, there is the pattern matching operator, =~. This operator is used with one String and one Regexp (the Ruby class that represents regular expressions). Logically, you might use this operator in a condition:

puts 'match' if str =~ regex

It doesn’t matter in what order you place the string and the regular expression:

puts 'match' if regex =~ str

Strings vs. Regular Expressions

It’s important to understand that the initial examples in the chapter perform just literal comparisons ...