Extract a substring from a string in Ruby using a regular expression

Question

"<name> <substring>"[/.*<([^>]*)/,1]
=> "substring"

No need to use scan, if we need only one result.
No need to use Python's match, when we have Ruby's String[regexp,#].

See: http://ruby-doc.org/core/String.html#method-i-5B-5D

Note: str[regexp, capture] → new_str or nil

String1.scan(/<([^>]*)>/).last.first

scan creates an array which, for each <item> in String1 contains the text between the < and the > in a one-element array (because when used with a regex containing capturing groups, scan creates an array containing the captures for each match). last gives you the last of those arrays and first then gives you the string in it.

You can use a regular expression for that pretty easily…

Allowing spaces around the word (but not keeping them):

str.match(/< ?([^>]+) ?>\Z/)[1]

Or without the spaces allowed:

str.match(/<([^>]+)>\Z/)[1]

Here's a slightly more flexible approach using the match method. With this, you can extract more than one string:

s = "<ants> <pants>"
matchdata = s.match(/<([^>]*)> <([^>]*)>/)

# Use 'captures' to get an array of the captures
matchdata.captures   # ["ants","pants"]

# Or use raw indices
matchdata[0]   # whole regex match: "<ants> <pants>"
matchdata[1]   # first capture: "ants"
matchdata[2]   # second capture: "pants"

A simpler scan would be:

String1.scan(/<(\S+)>/).last