ruby - How to use double brackets in a regular expression?

Question

What do double square brackets mean in a regex? I am confused about the following examples:

/[[^abc]]/

/[^abc]/

I was testing using Rubular, but I didn't see any difference between the one with double brackets and single brackets.

Answer 1

Posix character classes use a [:alpha:] notation, which are used inside a regular expression like:

/[[:alpha:][:digit:]]/

You'll need to scroll down a ways to get to the Posix information in the link above. From the docs:

POSIX bracket expressions are also similar to character classes. They provide a portable alternative to the above, with the added benefit that they encompass non-ASCII characters. For instance, /d/ matches only the ASCII decimal digits (0-9); whereas /[[:digit:]]/ matches any character in the Unicode Nd category.

/[[:alnum:]]/ - Alphabetic and numeric character
/[[:alpha:]]/ - Alphabetic character
/[[:blank:]]/ - Space or tab
/[[:cntrl:]]/ - Control character
/[[:digit:]]/ - Digit
/[[:graph:]]/ - Non-blank character (excludes spaces, control characters, and similar)
/[[:lower:]]/ - Lowercase alphabetical character
/[[:print:]]/ - Like [:graph:], but includes the space character
/[[:punct:]]/ - Punctuation character
/[[:space:]]/ - Whitespace character ([:blank:], newline,
carriage return, etc.)
/[[:upper:]]/ - Uppercase alphabetical
/[[:xdigit:]]/ - Digit allowed in a hexadecimal number (i.e., 0-9a-fA-F)

Ruby also supports the following non-POSIX character classes:

/[[:word:]]/ - A character in one of the following Unicode general categories Letter, Mark, Number, Connector_Punctuation
/[[:ascii:]]/ - A character in the ASCII character set
# U+06F2 is "EXTENDED ARABIC-INDIC DIGIT TWO"

/[[:digit:]]/.match("u06F2")    #=> #<MatchData "u{06F2}">
/[[:upper:]][[:lower:]]/.match("Hello") #=> #<MatchData "He">
/[[:xdigit:]][[:xdigit:]]/.match("A6")  #=> #<MatchData "A6">