From: Arnaud Bergeron <abergeron@...>
Date: 2006-07-29T05:21:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Finding "\" in a string

On 7/28/06, Eric Armstrong <Eric.Armstrong@sun.com> wrote:
> 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.

irb> puts '\\'
\
=> nil

You are replacing single slashes with sigle slashes.

> 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?
>



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