Next: 1.7.2 Splitting Up: 1.7 Regular expressions Previous: 1.7 Regular expressions Contents Index

## 1.7.1 Matching

The following snippet iteratively searches for capitalized words:

    `This is an Onyx string.'

    {dup `[A-Z]\w+' <$g true> match}{
        0 submatch 1 sprint
    } while

The above code generates the following output:

    `This'
    `Onyx'

The `$g` flag to the match operator says to store the location to start the next match at, which is what makes the `while` loop possible. The submatch operator gets the substring of the input string that the regular expression most recently matched.

With a slight modification to the previous example, it is possible to get at the capital letters, rather than the entire capitalized words. This is achieved by using a set of capturing parentheses, and changing the argument to submatch :

    `This is an Onyx string.'

    {dup `([A-Z])\w+' <$g true> match}{
        1 submatch 1 sprint
    } while

This generates the following output:

    `T'
    `O'

This is a trivial example of how capturing subpatterns can be used, but the possibilities are wide and varied.