From: Paul Wistrand <pwistrand@...>
Date: 2005-02-18T09:59:47+09:00
Subject: Newbie needs help with escaping regex

Hi,
    I have a simple project that I thought I'd have a crack at in Ruby. I
want to retrieve a list of names from a web page but the Ruby interpreter is
giving me allot of trouble in parsing the pattern for the regular
expression. The pattern I wanted to use was the following :

pattern =
/<span\sclass\s=\s"rankingName"><a\shref="w3xp-player-profile.aspx\?Gateway=
([^&]*)&PlayerName=([^"]*)">((\n|.)*?)</a></span>/

understandably the forward slash in the closing span tag causes Ruby to
think this is the end of the pattern. Hence my question is how the heck do I
escape this?

Thanks
Paul

B.T.W I realise that following works just as well...
pattern =
/<span\sclass\s=\s"rankingName"><a\shref="w3xp-player-profile.aspx\?Gateway=
([^&]*)&PlayerName=([^"]*)">((\n|.)*?)</