As part of my Christmas reading, I am currently devouring the fantastic Ruby Best Practices from O’Reilly, which is packed with a plethora of tricks that remind you on each page why Ruby programming is joyous and beautiful.

The book pointed out one particular trick of which I wasn’t aware. When you want to capture a regular expression match from a string, you can simply index into the string with the regular expression, and the capture number.

>> str = "First name: Jeff      Last name: Shantz"
=> "First name: Jeff      Last name: Shantz"
>> first_name = str[/:\s*(\w+)[^:]+:\s*(\w+)/,1]
=> "Jeff"
>> last_name = str[/:\s*(\w+)[^:]+:\s*(\w+)/,2]
=> "Shantz"