Regular expression matches against strings return MatchData objects. In this week's tip, we'll look at three different methods to call on MatchData objects to get the data we're looking for. We'll follow an example of matching against a URL using this (excuse the awkward wrapping due to the limitations of email): match = "https://rubyweekly.com/issues/537/"\
.match(/(\w+).com\/.*\/(\d+)/)
=> #<MatchData "rubyweekly.com/issues/537/"
1:"rubyweekly" 2:"537">
1. MatchData#captures gives us an array of only the captures from the match. It's the same as match.to_a[1..-1]: match.captures
=> ["rubyweekly", "537"]
2. MatchData#pre_match and MatchData#post_match give us the parts of a String that appear before and after a match. match.pre_match
=> "https://"
match.post_match
=> "/"
3. We can name captures by passing a ?<name> inside the capture group, like this: match = "https://rubyweekly.com/issues/537"\
.match(/(?<issue>\d+)/)
=> #<MatchData "537" issue:"537">
match["issue"]
=> 537
Try these out the next time you're using Regexp matching. | 
