Regex with named capture groups getting all matches in Ruby

Question

I have a string:

s="123--abc,123--abc,123--abc" 

I tried using Ruby 1.9's new feature "named groups" to fetch all named group info:

/(?<number>\d*)--(?<chars>\s*)/ 

Is there an API like Python's findall which returns a matchdata collection? In this case I need to return two matches, because 123 and abc repeat twice. Each match data contains of detail of each named capture info so I can use m['number'] to get the match value.

Answer 1

Named captures are suitable only for one matching result.
Ruby's analogue of findall is String#scan. You can either use scan result as an array, or pass a block to it:

irb> s = "123--abc,123--abc,123--abc" => "123--abc,123--abc,123--abc"  irb> s.scan(/(\d*)--([a-z]*)/) => [["123", "abc"], ["123", "abc"], ["123", "abc"]]  irb> s.scan(/(\d*)--([a-z]*)/) do |number, chars| irb*     p [number,chars] irb> end ["123", "abc"] ["123", "abc"] ["123", "abc"] => "123--abc,123--abc,123--abc" 

Answer 2

Chiming in super-late, but here's a simple way of replicating String#scan but getting the matchdata instead:

matches = [] foo.scan(regex){ matches << $~ } 

matches now contains the MatchData objects that correspond to scanning the string.