What is the “=~” operator in Ruby?

Question

I saw this on a screencast and couldn\'t figure out what it was. Reference sheets just pile it in with other operators as a general pattern match operator.

Answer 1

As the other answers already stated, =~ is the regular expression vs string match operator.

Note: The =~ operator is not commutative

Please consider the note below from the ruby doc site, as I have seen yet only the first form

str =~ regexp 

used in the other answers:

Note: str =~ regexp is not the same as regexp =~ str. Strings captured from named capture groups are assigned to local variables only in the second case.

Here is the documentation for the second form: link