title: How to write a Ruby switch statement (case...when) with regex and backreferences?
body: <p>I know that I can write a Ruby case statement to check a match against a regular expressions.
  However, I'd like to use the match data in my return statement. Something like this semi-pseudocode:</p>
  
  <pre><code>foo = "10/10/2011"
  
  case foo
      when /^([0-9][0-9])/
          print "the month is #{match[1]}"
      else
          print "something else"
  end
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How can I achieve that?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>Just a note: I understand that I wouldn't ever use a switch statement for a simple case as above, but that is only one example. In reality, what I am trying to achieve is the matching of many potential regular expressions for a date that can be written in various ways, and then parsing it with Ruby's Date class accordingly.</p>