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Comment by jherdman | Hacker News Reader

If you're capturing something you don't want, you can always prefix your match with '?:' to have a non-capturing group.

FWIW, I personally prefer the #match method. Some of the examples in this article just make me want to hurt people. Especially usage of $1, $2, etc.

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In that case, /([^@]+)@(.+$)/.match("foo@example.com")[0] returns the whole string matched by the expression, and [1] and [2] return the first and second groups. That's why the throwaway is there. To get rid of the throwaway, this is a possibility:

  username, domain = */([^@]+)@(.+$)/.match("foo@example.com").captures

Of course, your string better match, otherwise you'll get a NoMethodError.

$1 and $2 are probably still there do to Ruby's Perl heritage. I don't particularly mind their use, but that's probably due to my long history with Perl.

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