How to get all marked characters in a string with ruby?

Question

For example, my string is:

"abcd :e fghi :j klmn"

I want to get :e and :j which with special mark : . Can I do it?

Answer 1

You can do this using String#scan :

"abcd :e fghi :j klmn".scan(/:\w+/)
# => [":e", ":j"]

"abcd :egg fghi :joke klmn".scan(/:\w+/)
# => [":egg", ":joke"]

Answer 2

"abcd :e fghi :j klmn".split(' ').select{|e| e.include? ':'}
=> [":e", ":j"]

or

"abcd :e fghi :j klmn".split(' ').select{|e| e =~ /^:\w/ }
=> [":e", ":j"]