ActsAsMatchable¶ ↑

Use regular expression patterns to match one or more attributes of an object with a single method: pattern_match(regex).

I owe thanks to bsampietro (Bruno Sampietro) for his example on ActsAsSearchable. See: github.com/bsampietro/acts_as_searchable

ActsAsMatchable is similar to ActsAsSearchable with the following differences:

• Rather than full or partial text matching, ActsAsMatchable is designed to support pattern and regular expression matching against one or more attributes of a ruby object. So, you can find patterns like phone numbers, email addresses,tax ids, etc that may appear in various attributes of an object.

• ActsAsMatchable is used to extend ActiveRecord objects however it does not utilize any SQL thus making it database agnostic.

• Matched attributes (if any) are returned from the pattern_match method call as a hash in the format {:col_name => value}

Install¶ ↑

Before you install this plugin, make sure you have the rspec-plugin-generator and rspec-rails plugins if you don’t already (and you really should ;)

script/plugin install git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec-rails.git
script/plugin install git://github.com/patmaddox/rspec-plugin-generator.git

Currently, this only exists as a Rails plugin, so:

script/plugin install git://github.com/terryjray/acts_as_matchable

Synopsis¶ ↑

class BlogComment < ActiveRecord::Base

    acts_as_matchable :all

end

# we can find phone numbers in any of the blog comment fields
phone_numbers = comment.pattern_match(/\d\d\d[-]\d\d\d[-]\d\d\d\d/)

# to specify certain fields (not all) just include the last after the declaration
acts_as_matchable :first_name,:last_name,:description

Contributing¶ ↑

Feel free to pitch in. You know the drill:

1. Fork the project.
2. Create a topic branch.
3. Implement your feature or bug fix.
4. Please at least add a test in the rspec file that demonstrates your addition
5. Commit and push your changes.
6. Submit a pull request.

I’ll do my best to keep up. Thx!

More Info¶ ↑

For an extended example, updates, and probably more detail than you’d ever need outside the source itself, you can see my announcement for the project at terryjray.blogspot.com/2011/02/introducing-actsasmatchable-plugin.html

Copyright¶ ↑

Copyright © 2011 Centrix Information Solutions, LLC, released under the MIT license