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I'm using ruby 1.9.2

string = "asufasu isaubfusabiu safbsua fbisaufb sa {{hello}} uasdhfa s asuibfisubibas {{manish}} erieroi"

Now I have to find {{anyword}}

How many times it will come and the name with curly braces.

After reading Regexp

I am using 

/{{[a-z]}}/.match(string)

but it return nil everytime.

manish nautiyal
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2 Answers2

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You need to apend a * to the [a-z] pattern to tell it to match any number of letters inside the {s, and then use scan to get all occurrences of the match in the string:

string.scan(/{{[a-z]*}}/)
=> ["{{hello}}", "{{manish}}"]

To get the number of times matches occur, just take the size of the resulting array:

string.scan(/{{[a-z]*}}/).size
=> 2
Chris Salzberg
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    Nice answer. I'd just like to add that if he needs to match upper and lowercase letters, he would need `[a-zA-Z]`. Cheers! – Sean Hill Dec 14 '12 at 10:06
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    @sean-hill Thanks! And I agree that `[a-zA-Z]` would probably be better, I just based my answer on the example which was all lowercase. – Chris Salzberg Dec 14 '12 at 15:30
  • Instead of '\*', a '+' might be better, as the '\*' would also match the string '{{}}'. – hd1 Dec 14 '12 at 15:48
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The regular expression matching web application Rubular can be an incredibly helpful tool for doing realtime regular expression parsing.

ezkl
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