[ruby-core:43006] Re: Bug in sub/gsub?

On Feb 28, 2012, at 6:41, James French <[e-mail]> wrote:
> I just got caught when trying to do a simple text replacement where the replacement string (a dynamic string, not a string literal) contained ‘\3’.
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> ruby –e “puts ‘foobar’.gsub(‘bar’, ‘\3’)”
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> gives ‘foo’, not ‘foo\3’ as I expected.
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> Its doing this because its interpreting \3 as a regex back reference. But why is it doing this? Neither parameter is a regex, therefore it should treat it as a literal IMO.
> 
The documentation makes no distinction between a Regexp and String for the first argument changing the behavior of replacement specials like \1, so you should not be surprised.