From: Neil Conway <nconway@...>
Date: 2001-01-31T05:50:10+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:10137] Easy regex question

Hi all,

I just learned Ruby recently (coming from Perl/Java/Python), and I've got
a simple question about regular expressions that I just can't seem to
work out. I'm trying to SQL quote a string (for now, just replacing all
single-quotes with backslash-single-quote - i.e. ' -> \').

In Perl, the following works fine:

$ perl
$str = "it's me";
$str =~ s/'/\\'/g;
print "$str\n";
it\'s me

In Ruby (Jan 18 snapshot), I get this:

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> str = "it's me"
"it's me"
irb(main):002:0> str.gsub(/'/, "\\'")
"its mes me"

Can someone tell me:

1) What Ruby is doing? I can't figure out what it's doing to go from
"it's me" -> "its mes me"

2) The correct regex to do what I'm looking for

Thanks, and sorry for asking dumb questions ;-) I think I've been
coding in Java for too long, my brain is going to mush!

Cheers,

Neil

-- 
Neil Conway <neilconway@home.com>
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