From: Zach Dennis <zdennis@...>
Date: 2005-02-18T10:06:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie needs help with escaping regex

Paul Wistrand wrote:
> 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|.)*?)</

Just add a \ slash before all characters you want to escape, in this 
case the forward slashes.

example:
   rgx = /<\/span>/

HTH,

Zach