From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2005-02-18T21:59:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie needs help with escaping regex

Logan Capaldo wrote:

> 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.

It's not a problem as long as they are balanced:

irb(main):004:0> %r{foo{0,1}}
=> /foo{0,1}/

So %r with one of the paired delimiters is usually a pretty good choice 
if you want to avoid escaping. Especially since you have to escape (, ), 
{ and } in Regexps anyway if they don't appear in one of the meta 
constructs in which case they would be balanced anyway.