From: Nikolai Weibull <mailing-lists.ruby-talk@...>
Date: 2005-11-24T22:28:57+09:00
Subject: Re: String#to_rx ?

Alex Fenton wrote:

> Possible RCR: would anyone else find this a useful addition to the
> core
> 
> class String
>  def to_rx
>    Regexp.new( Regexp.escape(self) )
>  end
> end
> 
> as a more straightforward & readable alternative to interpolation:
> 
> /#{Regexp.escape(a_string)}/
> 
> I turned up a few references to this sort of thing in ruby code on the
> web.

Please, everyone read http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/06/04/apo5.html and
let's use that as a base for regexes in Ruby 2.  Trying to put a string
literal in a regex shouldn't be hard and Ruby should just "do the right
thing" for you.  I think that regular expressions have been grossly
misused in a lot of places and a lot of ways in the applications of
computer science.  I realize that we can't go back, but to be able to go
forward, perhaps we need to stop and look around - more and more
metacharacters, funky escapes, and so on isn't sustainable in the long
run.  Apocalypse 5 is a good base and I think that a lot of nice things
can come out of it (well, we're here, three years later, and still
nothing, but bear with me).

I also want a way to feed data to a regular expression for christmas, so
if you're into the whole thing of "the joy of giving", then I'm
certainly into the whole thing of "the joy of receiving".

        nikolai

-- 
Nikolai Weibull: now available free of charge at http://bitwi.se/!
Born in Chicago, IL USA; currently residing in Gothenburg, Sweden.
main(){printf(&linux["\021%six\012\0"],(linux)["have"]+"fun"-97);}