Ruby 2.4 Extracting captured data from Regexp results

Ruby has MatchData type which is returned by Regexp#match and Regexp.last_match.

It has methods #names and #captures to return the names used for capturing and the actual captured data respectively.

1
2pattern = /(?<number>\d+) (?<word>\w+)/
3match_data = pattern.match('100 thousand')
4#=> #<MatchData "100 thousand" number:"100" word:"thousand">
5
6>> match_data.names
7=> ["number", "word"]
8>> match_data.captures
9=> ["100", "thousand"]
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If we want all named captures in a key value pair, we have to combine the result of names and captures.

1
2match_data.names.zip(match_data.captures).to_h
3#=> {"number"=>"100", "word"=>"thousand"}
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Ruby 2.4 adds #named_captures which returns both the name and data of the capture groups.

1
2pattern=/(?<number>\d+) (?<word>\w+)/
3match_data = pattern.match('100 thousand')
4
5match_data.named_captures
6#=> {"number"=>"100", "word"=>"thousand"}
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