Named Regex Captures in Ruby 2.4

27 Feb 2018

As of Ruby 2.4 you can now name your regex captures, rather than just using numbers. Name the capture with ?<name> at the beginning of the capture group. Then you can access it with the .values_at methods using a list of symbols.

pattern = /(?<year>\d{4})-(?<month>\d{2})-(?<day>\d{2})/
pattern.match('2018-02-27').values_at(:year, :month) # => ['2018', '02']

Giving things names makes is easier to come back to, read, and understand.