Is it possible to make this ruby regex code shorter?

Question

regex = Regexp.new(/param\s*=\s*([^\|]*)/)
regex.match(text).to_s
link = $1
link.strip!

espesially code like this:

regex = Regexp.new(/regex/)
regex.match(text).to_s
match = $1

I even tried gsub misuse, but it is not The Right Way®

match = gsub Regexp.new(/.*(regex).*/, '\1')

Answer 1

So given a string like this:

s = "blah blah param=pancakes|eggs"

You want to extract just "pancakes", right? If so, then:

you_want = s[/param\s*=\s*([^|]+)/, 1]

The \s* will eat up any leading whitespace so half of your strip! is not needed. If you don't want any whitespace inside the extracted value at all then:

you_want = s[/param\s*=\s*([^|\s]+)/, 1]

If you just want to strip off the trailing whitespace, then add an rstrip:

you_want = s[/param\s*=\s*([^|]*)/, 1].rstrip

This one will throw an exception if s doesn't your regular expression though.

See String#[] for further details.

I've also changed your []* to []+ to avoid matching nothing at all. Also, you don't have to escape most metacharacters inside a character class (see Tim's comment) so just | is fine inside a character class.

Answer 2

text =~ /param\s*=\s*([^|]*)/
match = $~[1]

gets the contents of the capturing group number 1 from your input string text into the variable match.