How do I write a regex to match and capture at the same time?

Question

I have a pseudo-code method that works like this:

def my_method(file)
  while(line = file.gets)
    case line
      when /^TEXT (.*)/
        puts line + <the text captured in the parenthesis of the regex> 
      else
        .....
    end
  end
end

Is there any way to do this?

EDIT:

The sample string is like:

TEXT a sample text

I want to have "a sample text" captured by the regex. I know this is not the proper way to do this, but this is just a demonstration, i.e. "YYYY-MM-DD format date in shell script" to figure out how to get the date in whatever format you want.

Yesterday's date can be found as:

date -d '1 day ago' +'%Y/%m/%d'

from "How To Get Yesterday’s Date using BASH Shell Scripting".

Replace the / with - or _ and then pass them in to the Ruby statement.

Edit: Vote for the other guy. Their answer actually has code.

give us the sample strings...otherwise how would we understand ? — Arup Rakshit, Jul 12 '13 at 20:46

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 12 '13 at 20:51

4

What you are looking for is puts "line#{$1}". The pseudo-globals $1, $2, $3, etc. refer to capture groups of the last Regexp match. (And $~ refers to the MatchData itself, if you'd like to work with that.)

answered Jul 12 '13 at 20:51

Chuck

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Thanks a lot. This is what I need. – Kevin Jul 12 '13 at 20:56

How do I write a regex to match and capture at the same time?

1 Answers1