From: Trish Ball <trish.ball@...>
Date: 2007-01-04T00:19:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Problems with Sting#sub and regular expressions

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I did change my expression to read:

irb(main):001:0> " ' Helen".sub(/^(['\s]*)/, "")
=> "Helen"

and that works on the first try... but I was just wondering why the previous
example does not work.

Thanks,
Trish

On 1/3/07, Trish Ball <trish.ball@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have been working on an expression using String#sub and am getting
> inaccurate results on the first time I run the expression, but not on the
> following times I run it.  Is there something wrong with my regular
> expression?
>
> The intent of my regular expression is to remove preceding spaces and
> apostrophes.
>
> irb(main):001:0> " ' Helen".sub(/^(['\s]*)(.*)/, "#{$2}")
> => ""
> irb(main):002:0> " ' Helen".sub(/^(['\s]*)(.*)/, "#{$2}")
> => "Helen

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