From: Jamal Mazrui <Jamal.Mazrui@...>
Date: 2006-04-18T06:13:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Beginner gsub and ri questions

Thanks, Austin.  I'm posting my current solution below.  There's
probably a more elegant way of counting the number of replacements using
the MatchData object or Regexp implicit variables, but I haven't figured
that out yet.

Jamal


text = "DOG Dog mouse dog rat dOg"
find = "dog"
replace = "cat"
find = Regexp.new(Regexp.escape(find), Regexp::IGNORECASE)

i = 0
text = text.gsub(find) {|match|i += 1; replace}
s = i.to_s + " replacement"
s += "s" unless i == 1

puts(text) # cat cat mouse cat rat cat
puts(s) # 4 replacements

-----Original Message-----
From: Austin Ziegler [mailto:halostatue@gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, April 17, 2006 1:45 PM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: Beginner gsub and ri questions


On 4/17/06, Jamal Mazrui <Jamal.Mazrui@fcc.gov> wrote:
> Thanks for the response.  Is there a way to do this without a regular
> expression?  To further explain, I want the program to be able to do
any
> kind of literal string replacement at runtime, except that case is
> ignored.  If I use a regular expression as the match string, then
> certain characters could be interpreted in special, non-literal ways,
> which is not what I want in this case.

What you want here is to construct your regular expression properly,
such as:

  catmatch = %r{#{Regexp::escape(cat)}}i
  stringval =~ catmatch

The Regexp::escape (ri it) will prevent your fears from coming true,
here.

-austin
--
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
               * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca