From: Stefan Lang <langstefan@...>
Date: 2006-07-31T07:11:17+09:00
Subject: Re: strange difference between irb and ruby

On Sunday 30 July 2006 21:05, naPOLeon wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm a just beginner to ruby and impressed by the possibility to
> test code in irb. Today I wrote a line of code in irb and it
> behaved as I expected. But when I inserted it in my program and
> executed with ruby, the code-block didn't worke. Maybe you could
> tell me why.
>
> The line
>
> a.scan(reg_exp).each {|w| print "#{w.to_s}: "; a.sub!(reg_exp,
> gets.chomp)}
>
> It asked me in irb depending on the size of 'a' for some input and
> replaced a part (I used the Regular Expression /<\w*>/) of the
> string 'a' with my input.
> But if I use this line in a program, the part 'gets.chomp' seems to
> be ignored. The result is no change on String 'a'.

I don't know if this is the problem here, but:
"gets" might not do exactly what you think it does...
Try changing it to "$stdin.gets".

Read:
  $ ri Kernel#gets
That's what you use now...
and:
  $ ri IO#gets
That's what you call with $stdin.gets.

HTH,
  Stefan