On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 10:56 PM, John Smith <rails-mailing-l...@andreas-s.net> wrote: > > Andrew Timberlake wrote: >> On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 9:35 AM, John Smith >> <rails-mailing-l...@andreas-s.net> wrote: >>> >>> I'll appreciate any help. >> >> Use word break matches in your regular expression as follows: >> >> <string>.gsub(/\bcar\b/, 'bike') >> >> Andrew Timberlake >> http://ramblingsonrails.com >> http://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewtimberlake >> >> "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education" - Mark Twain > > Thanks. What if I have...? > > "Lorem ipum car. Locar ipsum,<p>car lorem ipusum</p>.Lorem car ipsum. > Lorem <a href='#'>car</a> ipsum." > > And now I want to obtain the same but I do not want to obtain <a > href='#'>bike</a>, >
This will start to get tricky as it becomes important to know what the rules really are. Are you wanting to avoid car surrounded by an anchor tag, or car surrounded by any tag. <p>car lorem ipusum</p> will pose a problem as it's half surrounded by a tag. so to satisfy your test case, the following works by making sure that car is not followed by a '<' which will work on both cases mentioned above. <string>.gsub(/\bcar\b(?=[^<])/, 'bike') This checks that car is surrounded by a word-break but is not followed by a '<' If, in Ruby 1.9, I do the following: <string>.gsub(/(?<!>)\bcar\b(?=[^<])/, 'bike') I am now checking that car is surrounded by a word-break and is not preceded by a '>' and not followed by a '<' however this pattern will not replace "<p>car lorem" with "<p>bike lorem" Andrew Timberlake http://ramblingsonrails.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewtimberlake "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education" - Mark Twain --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
