From: William James <w_a_x_man@...>
Date: 2006-07-29T09:50:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Finding "\" in a string

Eric Armstrong wrote:
> Paul Battley wrote:
> > On 29/07/06, William James <w_a_x_man@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> >> puts "\\foo\\bar".gsub(/\\/, '\&\&' )
> >> \\foo\\bar
> >
> > Nice solution.
> >
> I'll say! Wild! What makes /that/ work???

\& is simply what was matched by the regex.

It's similar in awk:

BEGIN {
  s = " foo "
  sub(/[^ ]+/, "&&&", s)
  print s
}

   ===>  foofoofoo