From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2005-05-19T06:18:34+09:00
Subject: Re: (newbie Q) opposite of inspect for strings

On May 18, 2005, at 3:45 PM, Basile Starynkevitch [news] wrote:

>
> 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?

Is this what you mean?

irb(main):001:0> str = "a\tb"
=> "a\tb"
irb(main):002:0> in_file = str.inspect
=> "\"a\\tb\""
irb(main):003:0> rebuilt = eval in_file
=> "a\tb"

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

Not sure I understand the question here.  Do you know how to open a  
file and read from it or is that what you want to see?

James Edward Gray II