Capture groups in Ruby - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Extracting Names with Capture Groups in Ruby

📖 Scenario: You work at a company that receives customer messages. Each message contains a greeting with the customer's first and last name. You want to extract these names to greet them personally.

🎯 Goal: Build a Ruby program that uses capture groups in a regular expression to extract first and last names from a greeting string.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a string variable called message with a greeting containing a first and last name.

Create a regular expression variable called name_regex that uses capture groups to find the first and last name.

Use the match method on message with name_regex to get the match data.

Print the extracted first and last names separately.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Extracting names from customer messages helps personalize communication in customer support and marketing.

💼 Career

Understanding capture groups and regex matching is useful for data extraction, text processing, and automation tasks in software development.

1

Create the greeting message

Create a string variable called message and set it to the exact value "Hello, my name is John Doe."

Ruby

# Create the greeting message string
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use double quotes and assign the exact greeting text to message.

2

Create the regular expression with capture groups

Create a regular expression variable called name_regex that matches the pattern "Hello, my name is FirstName LastName." and uses capture groups to capture the first and last names as words.

Ruby

message = "Hello, my name is John Doe."
# Create the regular expression with capture groups
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use parentheses () to create capture groups for first and last names. Use \w+ to match word characters.

3

Match the regular expression to extract names

Use the match method on message with name_regex and assign the result to a variable called match_data.

Ruby

message = "Hello, my name is John Doe."
name_regex = /Hello, my name is (\w+) (\w+)\./
# Use match method to get match_data
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Call match on message with name_regex and save the result.

4

Print the extracted first and last names

Print the first name by accessing match_data[1] and the last name by accessing match_data[2], each on its own line.

Ruby

message = "Hello, my name is John Doe."
name_regex = /Hello, my name is (\w+) (\w+)\./
match_data = message.match(name_regex)
# Print first and last names
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use puts to print each captured group from match_data.