From: Eric Armstrong <Eric.Armstrong@...>
Date: 2006-07-29T05:11:00+09:00
Subject: Finding "\" in a string

I'm going crazy, right? Surely it is possible
to find a backslash (\) in a string, and
replace it with two backslashes. That's simple,
right? Just gsub("\\", '\\'). That's all there
is to it.

Except that...

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

testpath = "\\foo\\bar"
p testpath    # => "\\foo\\bar"  --representation
puts testpath # => \foo\bar      --what you see

result = testpath.gsub("\\", '\\')
p result      # => "\\foo\\bar"
   (represenation unchanged. Should be "\\\\foo\\\\bar")

puts result   # => \foo\bar
   (unchanged. should be \\foo\\bar)

I've tried lots of gsub variations, like
    /\\/, '\\', "\\\\", and anything else I could
think of that came even close to being sensible,
but I've yet to find anything that works.

My workaround will be to add a sed script to
filter the input. But surely that isn't necessary.
Is it?