Store regex matches in ruby?

Question

I'm parsing a file with ruby to change the data formatting. I created a regex which has three match groups that I want to temporally store in variables. I'm having trouble getting the matches to be stored as everything is nil.

Here is what I have so far from what I've read.

regex = '^"(\bhttps?://[-\w+&@#/%?=~_|$!:,.;]*[\w+&@#/%=~_|$])","(\w+|[\w._%+-]+@[\w.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,4})","(\w{1,30})'

begin
  file = File.new("testfile.csv", "r")
  while (line = file.gets)
    puts line
    match_array = line.scan(/regex/)
    puts $&
  end
  file.close
end

Here is some sample data that I'm using for testing.

"https://mail.google.com","Master","password1","","https://mail.google.com","",""
"https://login.sf.org","[email protected]","password2","https://login.sf.org","","ctl00$ctl00$ctl00$body$body$wacCenterStage$standardLogin$tbxUsername","ctl00$ctl00$ctl00$body$body$wacCenterStage$standardLogin$tbxPassword"
"http://www.facebook.com","Beast","12345678","https://login.facebook.com","","email","pass"
"http://www.own3d.tv","Earth","passWOrd3","http://www.own3d.tv","","user_name","user_password"

Thank you,
LF4

Answer 1

This won't work:

match_array = line.scan(/regex/)

That's just using a literal "regex" string as your regular expression, not what's in your regex variable. You can either put the big ugly regex right into your scan or create a Regexp instance:

regex = Regexp.new('^"(\bhttps?://[-\w+&@#/%?=~_|$!:,.;]*[\w+&@#/%=~_|$])","(\w+|[\w._%+-]+@[\w.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,4})","(\w{1,30})')
# ...
match_array = line.scan(regex)

And you should probably use a CSV library (one comes with Ruby: 1.8.7 or 1.9) for parsing CSV files, then apply a regular expression to each column from the CSV. You'll run into fewer quoting and escaping issues that way.