From: mss <matt_smith@...>
Date: 2005-01-21T01:21:00+09:00
Subject: Yet another gsub question.

Greetings All,

Yes, Ruby newbie here.  I started reading up on Ruby a week or so ago
and have dug up quite a few web sites, docs, etc.  Anyway, after
spending the past week reading, and at least 6 hours (if not more)
Google-ing and looking up gsub examples, I am still at a loss.  I see
lots of examples of substituting \ with \\, etc.  I have yet to see an
example of replacing \" with a simple ".  Anyway, I've Googled 'til I'm
exhausted and this is my last ditch effort to learning Ruby.  I could
have written this script in PERL 10 times over, in the time it has
taken me to get no-where with Ruby.

Anyway, the following code should pull the HTML from a web site and
present it in such a manner as to allow redirection to a file in a good
HTML format.

---8<---
# Example from
#
http://phrogz.net/ProgrammingRuby/lib_network.html#networkandweblibraries
require 'net/http'

# Attempt to make a connection.
h = Net::HTTP.new(ARGV[0], 80)

# Attempt to get the page / data.
resp, data = h.get('/', nil )

# Display the status and messages.
puts "Code = #{resp.code}"
puts "Message = #{resp.message}"
resp.each {|key, val| printf "%-14s = %-40.40s\n", key, val }

# Actual web page contents
data.gsub!(/\"/,'"')
p data
---8<---

>From the command line, I issue the following command:
myunixbox > ./rover.rb www.somesite.com

The output then resembles:
.... <div class=\"footer\"> ...

(note the \")

If I attempt to redirect the output to a file:
myunixbox > ./rover.rb www.somesite.com > somefile.html

The \" also get stuck in the file.

However, if I change the gsub code to:
data.gsub!(/\"/,'*')

The output changes to:
.... <div class=*footer*> ...

Obviously gsub is properly detecting the \" pair, and it knows to
replace it with * (in that example), but for the life of me I cannot
figure out why it has to keep escaping the ".
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

-Matt