From: Jeremy Wells <jwells@...>
Date: 2006-11-24T01:39:05+09:00
Subject: double-slashes in input causing trouble

I'm writing a ruby program that reads a file, reads sections out of that 
file, writes a header to each section and then writes the whole file 
back to disk. The problem is that if the section contains "\\" which 
mine does in places, ruby replaces these with a single "\" without my 
asking it to.

Here is the basics of the program:
body = ""
File.open(input, 'r') do |file|
    body = file.read
end

if body =~ /^section\sheader(.*)section\sfooter/mi
    original_section = $1
    new_section = bit_at_top + original_section
    new_body = body.sub(original_section, new_section)

    File.open(input,'w') do |file|
       file.write new_body
    end
end

If the original_section contains "\\" then this gets replaced by "\", 
can I stop this happening?

Jeremy