Convert Ruby ranges to regular expressions
Recently I noticed that there is no a Rubyß library that allows to convert Ruby ranges to regular expressions. That’s why I decided to write it by myself and this post is just a sharing the gem’s link and a few examples how to use the gem.
Problem
Assume you have a Ruby range and have to transform it to a regular expression. Say, you have -9..9
and have to get /-[1-9]|\d/
. For the first glance the solution looks rather easy but to get an optimized solution it requires a lot of time if you don’t know an algorithm to do this.
Recently I had to solve an issue like this and, honestly, I couldn’t solve the task in 2 hours. Then I started to search a ready solution in Google and finally I found its implementation in Python. Thankfully my curiosity I’ve already learned Python and could manage to translate the algorithm into Ruby within 1 hour. And finally I released a gem with the algorithm.
So if you have the issue the gem may be helpful for you.
Solution
The gem is called range_regexp
and located here.
These are few examples of its usage:
Conclusion
Now we can convert ranges to regular expressions easily using Ruby. You don’t have to reinvent a wheel, just get the gem and use it. If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to contact me.