I’m pretty sure that cruisecontrol.rb does not hand svn:externals properly so I’ve have to explore regexes in Ruby. In doing this I found the super handy Rubular online regex testing site. It is certainly easier to debug these things in realtime in a browser than kicking off a full cc build.

There is however a tiny glitch in it.

In HTML, multiple whitespaces in text get merged into a single one. If you want/need multiple ones then you need to insert the ‘not breaking space’ HTML entity code; & . The results of Rubular appear to be neglecting this.

Using the regex

(.*-r[ ]{2,}\d+\s+|\s?)(.*)

against the string

geokit -r       45 svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/geokit/trunk

results in the following matches

• geokit -r 45
• svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/geokit/trunk

Remember the rule about whitespace?

The first match should have been: geokit -r        45 

The devil, as is often the case, is in the details.