David Greenhalgh
•
•
•
•
•
•
I’ve often felt like Ruby Regexp captures are a bit clumsy.
Let’s say we need to break apart phone numbers:
After executing this match, we might do something like this with the parsed number:
What’s up with the dollar signs and the sequential numbers?
I feel like I’m writing assembly code and referring to registers or memory offsets or something.
If I’m a new Ruby programmer reading this code, I might have no idea what is going on here.
We can do better if we upgrade from magical variables to the Regexp.last_match method:
At least this is a bit more readable than the magic variables.
And it’s probably easier for a newcomer to find documentation for Regexp.last_match than $1.
But there’s an even better way in Ruby 1.9 - named captures:
Now we’ve got readable code, and better documentation built into our regular expression.
Are you using Ruby 1.9 yet? If so, have you had a chance to use named captures?
Interested in learning more about our basic and advanced Back-End Courses?
Learn from the experts at a Big Nerd Ranch Bootcamp!
Interested in leveling up your coding skills from the same authors of the Big Nerd Ranch Guide? Subscribe to The Frontier today!
David Greenhalgh
Anna Sedlar
Devon Bull
Josh Justice
Josh Justice