From: Logan Capaldo <logancapaldo@...>
Date: 2005-02-18T10:15:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie needs help with escaping regex

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 10:06:04 +0900, Zach Dennis <zdennis@mktec.com> wrote:
> 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
> 
> 

An alternative is to use %r{} syntax.

%r{(now|I)can (use)+ as many /* as I? want}

Of course the downside being is now you have to escape { }. But your
pattern doesn't seem to contain any of those anyway.