How do I get the match data for all occurrences of a Ruby regular expression in a string?

Question

I need the MatchData for each occurrence of a regular expression in a string. This is different than the scan method suggested in Match All Occurrences of a Reg

Answer 1

I'm surprised nobody mentioned the amazing StringScanner class included in Ruby's standard library:

require 'strscan'

s = StringScanner.new('abc12def34ghijklmno567pqrs')

while s.skip_until(/\d+/)
  num, offset = s.matched.to_i, [s.pos - s.matched_size, s.pos - 1]

  # ..
end

No, it doesn't give you the MatchData objects, but it does give you an index-based interface into the string.