On Jan 29, 2007, at 1:28 PM, Gregory Seidman wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 03:24:40AM +0900, Tom Pollard wrote:
>> Does Ruby support regexps that assign names to specific matched
>> groups?  In Python, for instance, if you write a regexp like this,
>>
>> TEMP_RE = re.compile(r"""^(?P<temp>(M|-)?\d+|//|XX|MM)/
>>                           (?P<dewpt>(M|-)?\d+|//|XX|MM)?\s+""",
>>                           re.VERBOSE)
>>
>> the match object will provide a hash with keys 'temp' and 'dewpt',
> [...]
>
> Take a look at this thread:
> http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/80270

Thanks very much for the quick response.  It sounds like the answer  
is that Ruby does not support named captures, but that the Oniguruma  
library supplies this feature.  I think it would be a nice feature to  
add in 1.9.  My experience is this is very useful (if not necessary)  
for composing non-trivial regexps.  Without them, it's just too easy  
to mess up the capture-group numbers when adding or removing  
parenthesized subexpressions in your regexp.

Tom