Text Processing with Ruby

Chapter 8Regular Expressions Basics

We’ve looked now at a variety of ways that you can get text into your Ruby programs: from the user, from a pipe, from files. The next step, naturally, is to actually do something with that input.

When processing text, our aims can generally be split into three broad categories: testing, where we check whether the data matches a particular pattern; extraction, where we try to pull interesting information out of the data; and transformation, where we convert the data from one format to another. Often, we’ll want to do some combination of all three of these things: checking for particular formats, extracting key pieces of information, and then transforming them (converting them to a different text format, ...