From: "Basile Starynkevitch [news]" <basile-news@...>
Date: 2005-05-19T05:45:14+09:00
Subject: (newbie Q) opposite of inspect for strings


Dear All

I am a novice in Ruby, and I appologize for asking such a basic
questions, but I did not found its answer in the Ruby in a Nutshell
book and after 10 minutes of Googling.

What is is opposite of inspect for strings, ie the function parsing
strings external representation (as strings)?

i.e. I do know that "a\tb".inspect gives the 6 character string
"\"a\\tb\"" but what is the method or function that, given the
argument "\"a\\tb\"" produces the "a\tb" string of 3 characters?

Also how can I easily parse (ie read) from a file such a string like
the output of inspect?

Again, apologies for asking probably a FAQ (which I didn't found in)

Regards.
-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/ 
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net 
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