Ruby Regexp group matching, assign variables on 1 line

You could use Match or =~ instead which would give you a single match and you could either access the match data the same way or just use the special match variables $1, $2, $3

Something like:

if ryan_string =~ /(^.*)(:)(.*)/i
   first = $1
   third = $3
end

You don't want scan for this, as it makes little sense. You can use String#match which will return a MatchData object, you can then call #captures to return an Array of captures. Something like this:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

string = "RyanOnRails: This is a test"
one, two, three = string.match(/(^.*)(:)(.*)/i).captures

p one   #=> "RyanOnRails"
p two   #=> ":"
p three #=> " This is a test"

Be aware that if no match is found, String#match will return nil, so something like this might work better:

if match = string.match(/(^.*)(:)(.*)/i)
  one, two, three = match.captures
end

Although scan does make little sense for this. It does still do the job, you just need to flatten the returned Array first. one, two, three = string.scan(/(^.*)(:)(.*)/i).flatten