Parsing a string of text and extracting bits of it out based on a matching piece of text

[davyddkelly]

Hi all,

So I have a block of text in a field like this (data is extracted from a web scraper):

Title blah blah blah Description blah blah blah Opportunity blah blah blah Contact Details blah blah blah

Basically I would like to know how I could pull out and parse/assign the following into separate data fields:

• Title and then all the text “blah blah blah” contained before “Description”
• Description and then all the text “blah blah blah” contained before “Opportunity”
• Contact Details and then all the text “blah blah blah” contained before “Contact Details”

I would rather avoid having to do this within the web scraper as it is really quite complex to do it that way.

Cheers,
Dav

[mishav]

:find & replace with a regular expression should help …

Pattern: Title(.+?)Description.+
Replace with: $1

Experiment here:

Bubble - Visual Programming

[davyddkelly]

aweosme thanks! this solved it (propmted by your idea) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3855654/regular-expressions-how-do-i-grab-a-block-of-text-using-regex-in-ruby